Reconciling opposites

Discover the second session of the seminar “Regards croisés sur la petite enfance” 2024-2025: Reconciling opposites: navigating between women's autonomy and prenatal protection

The seminar looks at early childhood as a social, historical and cultural construct. Theories and knowledge relating to the conception, birth and development of children are analyzed in terms of their interactions with their environment and gender norms. Against this backdrop, the seminar will explore the boundaries of this age category and address the question of its temporality according to medical, international, anthropological or historical standards.

The aim of this talk is not only to understand how French society regulates the balance between women's autonomy and prenatal life, but also to question anti-abortion rhetoric. It seems that what is at stake in the abortion debate is the difficulty of clearly defining the status of the being before birth. After analyzing how anti-abortion discourse deliberately blurs the categories between human and person, Anne-Sophie Giraud will show that this apparent contraction is inscribed in the very status of the being before birth. The being is torn between the thing and the person, without ever being totally attached to either. .

• Anne-Sophie Giraud: Anthropologist CNRS (LISST1)
• Discussant: Suremain: Anthropologist at the Institut de Recherche sur le Développement (IRD), CNRS