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- Title
The Potential Life: Liminality of Visibility, Viability, and Potentiality within Reproductive Freedom.
- Authors
Mingé, Jeanine M.; Silverman, Rachel E.
- Abstract
In this article, we explore the issue of miscarriage and abortion and work to delineate the space between "life" and "being alive." We claim that in the liminal space between life and being alive, the potentiality of something becoming a life does not make it a life. We use collaborative autoethnography to approach visibility, viability, and potentiality within the field of reproductive freedom. Our stories and the stories of others illuminate difficult components—visibility of the embryonic abject, viability of the fetus, and the potentiality of life, which differs from being alive—within the liminal spaces of the right to choose and the miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy. The liminal space of "a life" and "being alive is fraught with contention, bogged down with emotional and religious attachments, and rhetorically framed by anti-choice protestors to blame the women who are making choices in a space of potential and possibility. The potentiality of something becoming a life does not make it a life. It is not a life until it is viable, it is not a life just because it is alive, it is not a life until it can live on its own outside the woman's body. The fetus is neither here nor there, neither human nor not human. It is potential. Embedded within potential there is possibility. But possibility does not make it a life.
- Subjects
ABORTION; MISCARRIAGE; LIMINALITY; AUTOETHNOGRAPHY; LIFE
- Publication
Women & Language, 2016, Vol 39, Issue 1, p75
- ISSN
8755-4550
- Publication type
Article