U.S. anti-abortion campaigners have recently succeeded in introducing new reproductive laws that compel pregnant women to see the results of compulsory ultrasounds prior to making the final decision to terminate a pregnancy. The focus of Jennifer Denbow’s book—the impact of reproductive politics on autonomy—is especially timely since, as Denbow argues, these laws are defended as practices that will enhance women’s autonomy as “proper self-governance” (p. 2). Anti-abortion campaigners frame women wanting an abortion as lacking the autonomy to make a real choice. Because they are therefore devised as incapable of proper self-governance, some U.S. states have redesigned their reproductive laws to require that pregnant women see a picture of their foetus, so they can make an allegedly informed choice regarding termination. The laws therefore claim “to promote autonomy by encouraging or mandating a certain decision” (p. 3). By extending the critique of the paradoxical deployment of liberal discourses of freedom and choice as modalities of government to the debates on abortion and mandatory ultrasounds, Denbow’s work makes a significant intervention into current U.S. abortion discourse.
This political intervention is a part of the larger theoretical project of the book, which is to refashion the notion of autonomy as a critical concept. The first chapter is dedicated to rejecting the traditional notion of autonomy as understood by Kant and Rousseau as proper self-governance and constructing a critical stance based on Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and John Stuart Mill. Denbow theorises autonomy as “critique and transformation [that] exposes and promotes the possibility of reflecting upon and resisting accepted notions of what constitutes appropriate and optimal governance” (p. 45). To do this, Denbow eschews a Kantian view of autonomy as proper self-governance, and instead brings Butler’s subversive politics of performativity into conversation with a reading of Foucauldian critique and Mill’s account of eccentricity to build a theory of autonomy that values both individual decision-making and recognises the potential for social transformation. This is an ambitious endeavour, but it is less clear why specifically autonomy should be prioritised as the avenue for critique and subversion. After criticising how states have advanced mandatory ultrasounds through a discourse of autonomy as proper self-governance in Chapter two and three, Denbow turns to an analysis of sterilisation. Voluntary sterilisation by childless women is offered as an act that potentially subverts the strong belief that all women want to be mothers, as well as the parallel assumption that those who choose sterilisation must be incapable of proper self-governance. Denbow makes a nuanced and well-articulated case for the potential of sterilisation to disrupt the link between maternity and womanhood. Had Denbow extended this argument to abortion, however, we may have noticed some more of the limitations to social transformation when women’s individual decision-making is prioritised. To explore this point further, it is necessary to first expand a little more on the tensions in Denbow’s of theory, especially with regards to the Foucauldian notion of power as productive and as transcendent of the state.
As Denbow repeatedly acknowledges, for both Foucault and Butler, the potential for critique emerges from the same discourses that govern us. For instance, she writes that “it is individuals’ very involvement in the ongoing reiteration or reconstitution of norms that creates the possibility of autonomy” (p. 53). Although Foucault does not theorise autonomy as such, Denbow relates autonomy to his notion of critique and counter-conduct, which for Foucault are inseparable from power. Because power also is not quantifiable or a substance or quality that can be possessed, neither is autonomy. Yet, it is precisely this kind of view of power that the book tends to slip into despite its efforts to get away from it. For instance, Denbow writes that “an essentialised notion of women… limits autonomy when autonomy is understood as self-transformation that involves shifting the force relations that play a role in the constitution of the subject” (p.69). Autonomy involves the process of self-transformation, enabled by the subject’s capacity to act. Denbow’s notion of autonomy therefore still relies on an understanding of power as capacity or agency. Here perhaps some discussion of Foucault’s later work on ethics and practices of the self may have been useful to push her concept of autonomy beyond agency, which automatically pits the subject against a structure, usually the state, in a game over power.
Although Denbow also makes a conscious attempt to refrain from being for or against state intervention, her theory of autonomy as critique and transformation has a tendency to cast the state and medical authorities as enemies whose “interference in individual decisions reinforces common norms” (p. 70). While it is hard to disagree with this, the problem is that when defending women’s right to “make a decision for themselves” (p. 70), Denbow seems to suggest that people making decisions for themselves have greater potential to resist norms than if their choices were regulated more directly by the state. This too overlooks Foucault’s argument that power should not be understood neither as primarily negative nor as bound to the state. Even if we get rid of the state, he wrote, we do not get rid of power. The availability of abortion upon request in places such as Canada and Europe is also a form of state regulation, but one that in many cases could be said to prioritise women’s self-governance. By focusing on the U.S. context, Denbow sometimes takes an almost libertarian position that tends to see individual choice-making and state non-intervention as better and condemns state and medical regulation as bad.
Indeed, the associative link between women and maternity is arguably just as strong in countries with no legal restrictions to abortion as it is in the United States. Through the concept of autonomy, Denbow seeks to “protect[…] individual self-governance,” but how transformative is self-governance? Feminists have long reified “women’s superior self-knowledge and personal decision-making ability” (p. 52), but that self-knowledge is surely always already conditioned by certain formations of power/knowledge. It is unclear why that socially constructed knowledge should by default be seen as more valuable and positive than other equally contingent forms of knowledge. This raises the question of whether it is autonomy that enables disruption and subversion, or is the mode of critique by which those disruptions are made.
In arguing that the essentialist view of women as mothers is restrictive and repressive, Denbow’s book resurrects one of the prevailing challenges for feminist politics, that is, how to undermine the link between womanhood and reproduction. There are epistemological tensions between the two critiques of autonomy that are deployed, but perhaps they do not need to be resolved. Indeed, because of this tension, the book is able to make a bold intervention into current U.S. discourses of reproductive politics and at the same time unapologetically provoke feminists to ask what is left of the concept of autonomy in the era of neoliberalism and postfeminism that has appropriated and depoliticised so many emancipatory discourses, and how it might still be mobilised to serve women’s emancipation.
