From the Administered Body to the Signifying Body: Bioethics, Biopolitics, and the Sacred in the Medicalization of Maternity

Abstract

The article proposes a reflection on the relations between bioethics, biopolitics, and the medicalization of social life, starting from the thesis that bioethics lacking biopolitical awareness remains naïve, while a biopolitics lacking ethical reflection becomes cynical. On the basis of Foucault’s definitions of biopolitics (1976, 1997) and Illich’s critique of social and cultural iatrogenesis (1976), the study distinguishes between the anatomo-politics of the body and the biopolitics of the population, and constructs a triple analytical grid — sociological, bioethical, and biopolitical — for contemporary phenomena of me­di­calization. To this grid is added Aurel Codoban’s model of the body as a surface of com­munication (2011), read here within the horizon of an ontology of the sacred and of the communicational construction of reality: medicalization does not leave the body “neutral”, but rather shifts its regime of signification, from the sacred toward the statistical and the communicational. The argument is tested through a case study devoted to the me­dicalization of maternity and to caesarean birth, in which both the bioethical–biopolitical tension and the ideological capture of the maternal body by pseudo-scientific “great replacement” narratives are analysed — narratives whose quasi-religious structure is cri­tically examined. The conclusion contends that a physician trained solely in bioethics, without an understanding of the power relations traversing the medical act, risks be­com­ing a technical executant, while a physician trained solely in biopolitical terms, without bioethical principles, risks confusing public health with social control.