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Death Panel

Teaser - Against Forced Life w/ Sophie Lewis (08/08/2022)

Death Panel

Death Panel

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4.8588 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe on Patreon and hear this week's full patron-exclusive episode here: www.patreon.com/posts/70203869 Bea and Artie speak with Sophie Lewis about their recent writing on the post-Roe abortion bans and reproduction as labor. Pre-order Sophie's forthcoming book "Abolish the Family" here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/4075-abolish-the-family Pre-orders are now live for Bea and Artie's book, Health Communism, out October 18th from Verso Books. Pre-order Health Communism here: bit.ly/3Af2YaJ Runtime 1:10:48, 08 August 2022 🧬

Transcript

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0:00.0

To hear the full episode, become a patron at petriam.com slash netpanel pod.

0:06.3

One of the sort of themes that you iterate on in full surrogacy now that also is a big part of the piece for the nation is, you know, really thinking about gestation as a type of labor, not just like the process of giving birth, which we,

0:23.7

you know, ironically call going into labor, but the actual, not just the like industry of

0:29.4

surrogacy, but the sort of actual, as you're saying, this reproductive function that birth has

0:34.5

in terms of like both reproducing capital, the family, society, workers, et cetera,

0:40.2

the sort of body, the collective body needs to be reproduced. And one of the things that you

0:45.6

talk about and you also expand on in this nation piece is sort of the idea of how reproductive

0:52.7

health care access factors into this and that what we're looking at right now in the current landscape is actually an expansion of forced labor because we're looking at an expansion of essentially laws that criminalize access to abortion and criminalize and further put pressure on providers, like,

1:12.5

out of providing these services in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is a

1:18.1

sticky point. I'm glad you're clarifying it or you're asking me to clarify it. There is,

1:23.9

at the core of full surrogacy now, the contention that not metaphorically, but actually,

1:31.6

you know, materially and literally pregnancy is work, that there's a lot of sort of mystification

1:38.4

in the culture, a lot of kind of oblique, insincere references to pregnancy as labor.

1:47.0

But paradoxically, I think that serves to get us further away from a true consciousness

1:55.4

of it as labor.

1:57.1

That's maybe a side point, but it's a mechanism I find quite intriguing.

2:02.8

Evangelicals will sometimes talk about pregnancy as a kind of labor with God and stuff.

2:08.5

But if it were to be connected literally to the sorts of conversations that we have in the United States

2:14.7

about the history of literally forced labor under,

2:18.9

for example, chattel slavery or something that would be an explosive and sort of unheard of

2:25.7

association, right? But in a liberal democracy, there is not supposed to be forced labor,

2:31.7

right? But, you know, because of some, I think quite interesting and intriguing

...

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