胎儿利益的民法保护

对胎儿利益的保护不是胎儿有无权利能力的问题,而是胎儿能否就其出生前的侵害请求损害赔偿的问题。对胎儿利益保护应注意下列问题:侵权行为的多样性、间接性,父母能否成为侵权主体?父母对损害发生有过错,能否适用过失相抵原则?父母阻却违法的允诺,是否对受害人有效等。     

Caesareans and Cyborgs

This paper argues that cyborg perspectives offer real possibilities for the debate around enforced caesareans and the search for a language to encompass embodied maternal subjectivity. It is suggested, with reference to the fictional narrative of Star Trek, that cyborg figures have the power to disrupt the liberal subject and the body in legal discourse, not least because the plethora of cyborgs challenges simple conceptions of connections/disconnections between bodies. Feminist readings of case law relating to enforced caesarean sections have raised questions about the notion of autonomy at the heart of liberal legalism, have argued that law is complicit with white male techno-medicine's approach to childbirth and focused upon the pregnant woman's lived experience of pregnancy. The recent Court of Appeal decision in St George's Healthcare N.H.S Trust v. S., Regina v. Collins and Others, ex parte S., where the pregnant woman's self-determination was upheld, provides a good opportunity to confront both the liberal story and the idea of connectedness between mother and unborn child. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cultural intertexts and scientific rationality: the case of pregnancy ultrasound

The text begins a line of dialogue between feminist and epistemological work in the life sciences using a case study of the concepts ‘foetus’ and ‘baby’ in diagnostic ultrasound and parental discourse. The case material illustrates the multiple, coexisting registers of clinical discourse and the significance of cultural intertexts, the insertion within biomedical discourse of concepts from other cultural domains. It follows that biomedical rationality lacks the autonomy that Canguilhem argued it has; rather than giving itself its own laws, biomedical rationality is heteronomous, receiving and using cultural intertexts from many and varied domains.     

Always More Than Two: Vibrations,the Foetus,and the Pregnant Person in Childbirth Singing Practices

The goal of this article is to expand the theoretical approaches in feminist research that have explored the relationship between the pregnant person and the foetus in terms of constitutive relationality. I examine new ways of understanding and conceptualizing such a relationship, which may be enabled by the concept of vibration, by focusing on a childbirth-singing method developed and taught by Finnish music educator Hilkka-Liisa Vuori. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork; I participated in a course on childbirth singing taught by Vuori and interviewed women who had used singing and vocalizing during pregnancy and labour. With the help of new feminist materialisms and feminisms inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s thinking, I suggest that sound and music as vibrations are agential matter that allow us to rethink the dyad between the pregnant person and the foetus. I argue that when the foetus–pregnant person dyad is approached as a constitutive relationality, more than two bodies are always involved.     

Dancing on the head of a pin? Foetal life and the european convention

The case of Vo v. France represents the latest phase of the European Court of Human Rights’ thinking on the scope of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to life) in relation to foetal life where a foetus had been lost owing to a medical accident. The Court by a majority decided that, “even assuming” Article 2 applied to the instant case (albeit to the life of the pregnant woman rather than that of the foetus), it had not been violated. While the facts in Vo were extreme and exceptional, the Court will shortly hear the case of D v. Ireland concerning access to abortion for foetal anomaly, an application made under Articles 3, 8, 10 and 14 of the European Convention. If the case of D were declared admissible, the Court would then have to consider whether a denial of access to abortion for foetal anomaly constitutes inhuman and degrading treatment contrary to Article 3, or an interference with a pregnant woman’s right to respect for private life under Article 8 (and if so, how the doctrine of the margin of appreciation applies). The Grand Chamber precedent of Vo displays ambivalence about whether Article 2 should apply to foetal life, and its resort to the “even assuming” formula spared Member States the difficulty of having to justify their various abortion regimes, by reference to this Article. It remains to be seen whether in a case like D that is directly concerned with abortion, the Court will take a more definite stance on the correct balance to be struck between the State’s interest in protecting foetal life and the Convention rights of pregnant women. Vo v. France [G.C.], judgment of 8th -July 2004, no. 53924/00; D v. Ireland [4th section], no. 26499/02, oral hearing on admissibility and merits, 6 September 2005