During the question period following my presentation at Syracuse University, one interlocutor asserted that I had confused the direction of causation between prenatal testing and bioethics. Prospective parents, he said, do not, as he understood me to suggest, avail themselves of prenatal testing because bioethicists tell them to do so. Rather, the technology has developed, prospective parents want to use it and do so, and then bioethicists write, teach, and advise about the ethical issues that arise from the expanding use of the technology, including how it should be used, for what purposes, when, and so on.

As often happens when I give a presentation, I replay in thought the dialogue that ensued subsequent to it in order to figure out how I might have approached the discussion from another direction, emphasized noteworthy aspects of a state of affairs that went unacknowledged, clarified misunderstandings about my position, etc.

In this case, I feel sure that my interlocutor underestimated me and had failed to appreciate the productive role of bioethical discourse and the power relations through which it has emerged and is sustained. He was determined to characterize bioethics in the widely accepted way, namely, as an unmotivated field of inquiry that (among its other concerns) grapples with ethical dilemmas that arise from the use of technology and scientific inventions and interventions. My confusion about the causal relation between bioethics and prenatal testing, he remarked, ran counter to “common sense.”

As readers and listeners of BIOPOLITCAL PHILOSOPHY will recall, I and other marginalized philosophers have written about the disciplining force of the notion of common sense and how it operates in philosophy especially. I am interested in particular (though not exclusively) in how the notion that “reality,” and how power operates within it, should be taken as self-evident and uncomplicated operates in the context of bioethics (including feminist bioethics and so-called disability bioethics) to enable outdated ideas about power to persist.

For despite the fact that associations and journals abound that promote bioethicists as a team of experts with respect to a certain set of questions–Should the baby live? Should we conduct experiments on animals? Who can we justifiably euthanize?–and phenomena–death and dying, chimeras, stem-cell research, and so on–none of these putative experts assumes an up-to-date understanding of force relations. Instead, bioethicists unanimously (albeit variously) conceive of power in the juridical terms of classical liberalism.

In other words, while, say, feminist bioethicists may think that they hold sophisticated ideas about power and oppression, their views are conditioned by the (neo)liberalism that motivates bioethics; that is, liberalism and neoliberalism (and the juridical conception of power on which they rely) have put in place the historical conditions of possibility for the field of bioethics, enabling it to emerge into discourse, to persist, and to expand, in part by neutralizing and coopting resistance to it.

Contra my interlocutor, my claim is not that bioethicists join medical appointments between physicians and pregnant people in order to instruct the latter to employ given practices of prenatal testing. As I explained to him, by now, prenatal testing and screening have been normalized as standard protocol for obstetric practice; indeed, the normalization of prenatal testing and screening is itself a technology of the historical conditions that make bioethics possible and that bioethics makes possible.

Interestingly, my interlocutor distinguished between the role of bioethicists in decision making with respect to prenatal testing and their role in decision making with respect to MAiD, almost apologetically conceding that bioethicists have instructed people to exercise their (allegedly) inalienable autonomy and seek out the services of a MAiD provider if they so choose. Here, too, however, the interlocutor conveyed a skewed understanding of how power operates with respect to bioethics and within bioethics.

In my next post, therefore, I will (again) draw upon recent and current events with respect to Canadian legislation on MAiD in order to clarify how the relation between this deplorable intervention and bioethics should be understood, including how the promotion and expansion of MAiD are necessary outcomes of the eugenic motivational assumptions that animate bioethics, professionally, institutionally, and economically.