The ‘dead baby card’ and the early modern accusation of infanticide: situating obstetric violence in the bio- and necropolitics of reproduction

Abstract

This article concerns a form of contemporary obstetric violence that is known as ‘playing the dead baby card’. Playing the dead baby card entails shroud waving where the threat to the foetus’ life is exaggerated to get the pregnant person to comply with obstetric policy. I argue that the playing of the dead baby card echoes the accusation of infanticide, which was prominent in the early modern witch hunts as the most common verdict for which women and midwives were executed, and which, since then, has run through the whole of Western modernity. The playing of the dead baby card can similarly be understood to have the negation of the pregnant person as its effect, such that the maternal subject cannot be conceptualised to be part of the biopolitical production of subjects. The de-subjectification of the mother is instead more reminiscent of Achille Mbembe's concept of ‘necropolitics’, in which certain life is actively negated for the flourishing of other life. Yet, this concept too fails to fully capture the negation of the maternal in the playing of the dead baby card; it is more apt to reserve the notion of necropolitics in reproduction for processes of racialisation that result in markedly higher rates of maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity for people of colour. This article therefore differentiates the negation of the maternal subject that comes to the fore in the playing of the dead baby card from both bio- and necropolitics as a matricide understood to be the condition of the biopolitical project of the accumulation and fostering of life.

Keywords

anti-abortion politics biopolitics infanticide necropolitics obstetric violence Silvia Federici the captive maternal witch hunts

Introduction

I notice the risk of transgression in my work as a midwife when I slip into it, as if there is a darkness looming behind my practice, behind the event of birth. I am continuously balancing on the border between, on the one hand, trust, confidence and empathy, and on the other, a neurotic regard for safety that is perhaps a front for fear – fear that my approach, a feminist, empathetic, respectful one, might get us all in danger.

This article is an examination of this fear.

When I give into it, I might do an internal exam ‘too enthusiastically’, as the Scottish midwife Mary Cronk (2011) described it: briskly command a certain position of the one who is giving birth or insert my fingers without real consent into their vagina as the baby's head is crowning to help speed up the birth. In the field, these are considered mild violations, if violations at all. But their manifestation in even my critical practice as an independent midwife, which is grounded in the belief in pregnant people's capability to birth, points to a pervasive logic in obstetrics.

The logic in question is based on a threat that resides in the background of obstetric practice, where the belief in a birthing person's capability and knowledge on how to give birth is suspicious to obstetric rationality. Self-determination is not only incompatible with what is deemed necessary, but almost conceived as a specific danger to safety by itself. Taking people in childbirth seriously is something so subversive that I, as a midwife, am worried to be on the wrong side, to be accused of irrationality, made out to be a witch, held responsible for the death of a child. When I am not resistant enough to overcome my worries, I step out of the practice of trusting, of waiting, of sitting in patience, into the battleground, into that playing field that all too quickly switches from being the origin of life to a triangle of violence, marked by both knees and sacrum. I start telling the one giving birth what to do, how to give birth, and match what I am saying with a ‘hands-on’ approach – the threat, ‘listen to me now otherwise your baby might die’, never uttered, but lying closely behind my lips. WHO (2019) data shows that the abuse of birthing people occurs most often when birth is most stressful: 15 minutes before until 30 minutes after the baby is born.

In this article, I aim to show that the denial within obstetric care of the capability of pregnant people to give birth themselves is a direct consequence of a negation of maternal subjectivity.¹ The persistence of this negation is remarkable when one considers that childbirth in the Global North is very safe, albeit not equally so for everyone: racism and concomitant neglect are, in the United Kingdom and the United States for instance, responsible for a four to five times higher mortality rate for Black women and babies (Knight et al., 2018; Petersen et al., 2019; Knight et al., 2022). In rich countries it should be possible, one would think, to create the conditions wherein all pregnant people can birth their child safely and the way they want to, to trust and empower their capability. Yet, as I have already begun to suggest, my own fear attests to the pervasiveness of the tendency to ‘handle’ birthing people, make them passive, tell them what to do. An injurious logic is embedded in obstetric care, one that denies pregnant people their subjecthood – their relational autonomy, rationality, freedom, responsibility, relationality and bodily integrity – and actively constructs the maternal as a passive, potentially dangerous place from which the child must be saved. A systemic violence haunts the maternal subject, while paradoxically aiming to save her and her child's life. What is the nature of this logic of saving and traumatising, of security and violence, of wanting her alive while denying her existence?

Rachelle Chadwick, Sara Cohen Shabot and Stella Villarmea all analyse this form of systemic violence, termed ‘obstetric violence’, as an injustice that intersects with other forms of oppression such as sexism, racism and classism, as well as a specific form of epistemological negation specifically tied to the labouring subject and its configuration as irrational, abject and vulnerable (see for instance: Villarmea and Guillén, 2011; Chadwick, 2018; Shabot, 2016; Shabot, 2020; Villarmea, 2020; Chadwick, 2021; Villarmea, 2021; Berzon and Shabot, 2023). I attempt to contribute to the understanding of the negation of the maternal subject as a logic both inherent to the practice and justification of obstetric violence. I understand this pattern of negation, present within obstetrics and society more broadly, as effectively carried out by the expropriation of the relations the maternal subject needs to thrive, namely the relation between the (pregnant) person and their (potential) child and the (pregnant) person and their community of care (such as the midwife) (van der Waal and van Nistelrooij, 2021; van der Waal et al., 2023). As such, I continue the effort of other scholars in understanding obstetric violence not merely as a violation of autonomy and self-determination but as a violation of the relationality central to maternal subjectivity and essential to birth freely (Shabot, 2021). I will do so by tracing what I argue is an exemplary form of this violence, namely the ‘playing of the dead baby card’: a mode of manipulation wherein the mother is told by a midwife or doctor that if she does not comply with institutional policy, her baby may die, thus rendering her responsible for the death of her child if she is not compliant (Chadwick, 2018; Morton et al., 2018; Chadwick, 2019). The playing of the dead baby card is exemplary of practices of obstetric violence since it illuminates both the logic behind most forms of this violence, namely the prioritisation of the baby over the mother, as well as its moral justification – bringing to the fore that justice in matters of reproduction is still very much understood as the protection of the child at all costs.

Western culture is rife with accusations of mothers killing their children. One only has to look at the ideological war over abortion, wherein ‘murder’ is still the most common accusation towards pregnant people. Silvia Federici (2004) elaborates extensively on how the accusation of infanticide played a key role in the early modern witch hunts, which, she argues, should be considered part and parcel of the process of primitive accumulation that was foundational for capitalism. The often-overlooked trauma of the witch hunts in Western European history, at the birth of modernity, was the foundation of a repetition of violence against women within the logic of capitalism, modernity and biopolitics (Federici, 2004). In this article, I trace the present-day playing of the dead baby card back to the early modern accusation of infanticide that played a key role in the process of primitive accumulation. My argument is that the accusation of infanticide lies at the heart of the foundation of a biopolitical power over reproduction and the consequent reconfiguration of reproduction in the modern era, which has the negation of the maternal subject as a consequence. To make sense of this negation, I follow the work of Silvia Federici (2004), Achille Mbembe (2003, 2019), Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato (2016), who have argued that biopolitics has always functioned through the negation of certain life in favour of the proliferation of other life. Below, I will first elaborate on obstetric violence, the maternal subject and biopolitics, before discussing three different ways in which the dead baby card is currently played, and its relation to necropolitics. Then, I trace the dead baby card back to the accusation of infanticide during the witch hunts and discuss how reproduction was primitively accumulated through this accusation. Finally, I will conceptualise the negation of the maternal from both biopolitics and necropolitics as a continuous matricide that is the condition for the biopolitical fostering of new life.

Situating the maternal subject, obstetric violence and the playing of the dead baby card in bio- and necropolitics

Biopolitics

While it can be argued that reproduction and the disciplining of the maternal subject play an important role in the exertion of biopower, the maternal as a subject did not take up a prominent place in the modern biopolitical project of the subjectification of life. Instead, she became strongly equated with nature and was used as that against which the enlightened masculine subject could be differentiated. Biopolitics, or biopower, is the Foucauldian concept essential to our understanding of the way modern power works, which shows that ‘power does not repress subjects’ but produces them (Mills, 2018: 25). The stronger the hold of biopolitics on the maternal, however, the more the maternal as a subject disappeared throughout modernity. This is not to say that pregnant people or parents did not have any subjectivity, but to point out that the figure of the maternal cannot be recognised as a subject in full capacity in Western modernity, and hence not part of the biopolitical production of subjects (Villarmea, 2020, 2021). Feminists like Simone de Beauvoir ([1949] 2010) considered pregnancy as a danger to the exertion of subjectivity, and it was not until the end of the twentieth century that the argument was proposed, by Sara Ruddick (1989), that mothers have a distinct subjective practice of thought that can be differentiated from the epistemic standpoints of other subjects. It is no coincidence that very few famous female writers and artists were mothers, and that if they were, it was particularly difficult for them to align their motherhood with their artistically far developed subjecthood (Phillips, 2022). When it comes to motherhood or even (the capacity for) pregnancy, there seems to be an impossibility present in Western modernity to be something that others, or even the self, recognise as a subject. While this might be no longer surprising, it stays remarkable since the biopolitical project specifically concerns the exertion of power via the subjectification of life. While the maternal herself falls outside of the scope of subjectification, she remains essential for the proliferation of subjects, as she gives birth to future subjects and/or raises them. Although she is not granted subjectivity herself, she is vital for the effectuation of biopolitics in the general population: while the biopolitical project of the fostering of life runs, so to say, through her, her own life is not fostered through subjectification but instrumentalised or merely extracted from.

Biopolitics established and sustained modern society and disciplined human life through the production of certain kinds of subjects. It is ‘a power whose highest function was no longer to kill, but to invest in life through and through’ (Foucault, 1998: 139; 2003: 241). As a consequence, excessive forms of violence used by the state, for instance torture or the death sentence, came into conflict with the construction of the modern nation state as the patron of the life of its population. Exerting direct oppressive power over life became ‘a limit, a scandal, a contradiction’ (Foucault, 1998: 138). Thereby, sovereign power, ‘the ancient right to take life or let live’, developed into a taboo, hidden within a system of biopower that fosters life and operates through the motto ‘to make live or let die’ (Foucault, 1998: 138; 2003: 241). The right to kill, the active negation of life, transformed, at most, into the passive neglect of life. In biopolitics, the focus of power switches from an oppressive non-productive power, exerting its rule through the negation of already existent life, to a politics that does not rule over life but is life: that defines, literally, what life is, through embodying it. As such, biopolitics is the ‘making sense’ of life, the constitution of a certain conception of life, in which ‘life’ instead of ‘death’ becomes the main signifier of power. Biopower is therefore most effectively carried out through institutions, such as schools, health care and prisons, rather than through a sovereign power – contributing to the medicalization of childbirth (Foucault, 1998: 144; 2003: 248).

The more childbirth became medicalised, the more the maternal subject lost her place in labour (Katz Rothman, 1989, 2016). Obstetrics, as the institution in which childbirth takes place, is partly responsible for the exertion of a form of biopower that does not form but inhibits maternal subjectivity, being productive of the maternal only in the small range of making this subject passive, vulnerable and docile (Shabot, 2016; Berzon and Shabot, 2023). Obstetrics is not engaged with the production of a maternal subject capable of effectively and productively giving birth but rather shames her into a passivity that bears little resemblance to a subject in full capacity (Shabot, 2016; Shabot and Korem, 2018; Villarmea, 2020, 2021). She is often forced to lie on her back, causing her pelvic joints to be ‘virtually immobilised’, overriding her possibility to act on instinctive knowledge, resulting in increased pain (Jowitt, 2018). At the same time, institutional protocols impose a chronological timeframe onto the process of childbirth, resulting in a serious limitation of the chance to give birth by herself (Stevens, 2010; Crowther et al., 2015). The violence of forced caesarean sections or vaginal examinations, scolding, gaslighting, neglect, hitting, verbal abuse or unconsented episiotomies (something that would be without a doubt recognisable as a case of severe violence in any other setting) produces severe trauma.

According to the philosopher Susan Brison, surviving trauma can be understood as surviving a ‘destruction’ or ‘undoing’ of the subject (2003: 38–40). It is an ‘outliving’ of the self: one does not survive as the same or prior subject; this self is destroyed, or, as Brison puts it, ‘murdered’. Brison's description of her experience of a traumatic event of rape is: ‘I was murdered in France last summer’ (2003: xi), making clear that the event destroyed her subjectivity after which it had to be, slowly and painfully, built up again as something new. Violence that can potentially result in serious trauma (even in those cases when it ‘luckily’ does not) can hence be regarded as a negation of subjectivity, a possible murder – in our case, a possible matricide – and hence as exceeding the mere productive disciplining of the subject. Even in cases of discipline, like in Foucault's examples of the prison or the school where physical punishment is replaced with disciplinary tactics, the idea of biopolitics is that power is still productive of subjectivity and does not fully destroy it: subjugation is won through a productive affirmation and formation of life. Such a conception of biopolitics is not tenable with regards to the maternal subject when the treatment at birth is so closely aligned to severe trauma that inhibits one's ability to think, to move freely, to birth, to love one's children, to take care of oneself or to have relationships with others.

While being forced to lie with one's legs in the stirrups could perhaps still be theorised as a disciplinary form of subjectification (although doubtfully so since it amounts to an almost full passivity that inhibits thought and instinct in labour), forms of physical abuse in the birthing scene have to be understood as potentially traumatising in a way that exceeds the biopolitical narrative of medical necessity in service of ‘life’ – at least when it comes to the life of the pregnant person. As such, obstetric violence seems to qualify as ‘a limit, a scandal, a contradiction’ of biopolitics (Foucault, 2003: 138), the contradiction being that, within a politics of subjectification, certain subjects lose their subjectivity and continue to be more prone to a process of de-subjectification, however masked by dominant narratives of life, health and medical necessity. As such, the widespread practice of obstetric violence brings to the fore the suspicion that there is another form of power at work that is not productive but destructive, grounded in a violent logic that is distinguishable from, but thoroughly intertwined with, biopolitics.

Necropolitics

Critical theorists such as Silvia Federici (2004), Achille Mbembe (2003, 2019), Éric Alliez and Maurizio Lazzarato (2016) understand the structural presence of violence within biopolitical capitalism as a destructive force that has always been part of biopolitics. In Necropolitics, Mbembe argues that there is another form of politics at work supplementary to biopolitics, which exposes itself exactly in the transgression of the limit: a politics that is ‘the difference put into play by the violation of the taboo’ (2003: 16). The taboo of death or ‘making die’ proper to biopolitics is continuously and invisibly violated through the determination of who, that is, which kind of subject, is taken up within the biopolitical project of subject formation, and who is not; whose lives are fostered and proliferated, and whose are instrumentalised or extinguished in the name of (other) life. Mbembe calls this ‘other law’ of violence at work within biopolitics ‘necropower’ or ‘necropolitics’, in order to emphasise that there is negation, destruction and oppression present within biopolitics which is essential to its functioning (2003: 14). The addition of necropolitics to the theory of biopolitics provides us with what Jasbir Puar calls a ‘bio-necro collaboration’ that can ‘conceptually acknowledge biopower's direct activity in death, while remaining bound to the optimization of life’ (2007: 35). This dual practice of cultivating some life and marking other life for death enables us to examine the relation within the biopolitical institution of obstetrics between the fostering and destruction of life, between its optimisation and traumatisation.

It is specifically this dual practice of biopolitics and necropolitics that is illuminating when studying the playing of the dead baby card in obstetric violence, and in reproductive violence more broadly. It is clear that the life of the child is fully part of the biopolitical project; indeed, the child can be considered the biopolitical subject par excellence, as it embodies and represents the future. In biopolitics, the fostering of future life is essential, as is attested to by eugenics, pronatalism and the criminalisation and stigmatisation of abortion at the height of modernity. Justice in matters of reproduction became configured as the protection of the life of the child, effectively obscuring that this is often at the cost of the instrumentalisation of the mother. This is exactly what we see in the playing of the dead baby card.

In anti-abortion activism, the dead baby card is played in regards to pregnant people, as they are accused of ‘murder’ or of ‘killing their babies’. Plastic embryos are strewn on the ground in front of clinics and ‘murder’ is written on pictures of aborted embryos. There is a negation of subjectivity implicit in this accusation, namely that pregnant people should be forced to carry out their pregnancies against their will, and hence allowed a full alienation of their bodies and lives, instead of having an abortion. In the biopolitical project of the fostering of life, wherein much value is placed on foetal and children's lives, the abortion of that life becomes constructed as the biopolitical taboo, as a moral transgression in the form of ‘murder’. The negation of pregnant people's subjectivity is not understood in like terms, however, since their lives can be alienated from them, and hence be negated, through forced pregnancy and childbirth. In this current playing of the dead baby card, it comes to the fore that the accusation of infanticide justifies the negation of pregnant people's subjectivity.

The playing of the dead baby card even transcends anti-abortion activism into explicitly pro-abortion discourse. In the Netherlands, in a recent upheaval over the decline of people using hormonal contraception, many pro-choice feminists were the first to defend this method of contraception over others since, being more efficacious, it reduces the risk of unwanted pregnancy and thus of abortion. To choose other contraceptive methods and thus allow a higher risk of having an abortion, rather than taking hormones, was called out as ‘unfeminist’, ‘bizarre’, a ‘tricky business’ and ‘irresponsible’, and compared to playing a game of ‘Russian roulette’ – in this metaphor, having an unwanted pregnancy and consequently an abortion was thus equated to the bullet (Curvers, 2023; Hunfeld, 2023; Zitvast, 2023). This reveals again an implicit negation of subjectivity of people with the capacity for pregnancy: despite the pill being an important invention, the fact is that it is a very invasive one, and it cannot be expected of people to take hormones for decades out of a sense of moral responsibility to potential life. Just as with moral debates when it comes to pregnancy or organ donation, the expectation of people with the capacity for pregnancy to use medical interventions for the protection of the (potential) life of someone else is a serious and far-going moral appeal that cannot be taken lightly. People with the capacity for pregnancy are thus – through the playing of the dead baby card in the metaphorical constructing of abortion as the bullet – endowed with such a grand moral responsibility for other potential life that it negates their self-determination, agency and subjectivity. The playing of the dead baby card hence equals the moral justification of both the negation of subjectivity of people with the capacity for pregnancy and the normative appropriation of the reproductive body.

If this is the cultural and political landscape when it comes to abortion and contraception, one can imagine how strong the prioritisation of the life of a fully grown foetus is. Taking the slightest risk as a midwife, doctor or mother quickly feels like committing a dangerous injustice, just like I felt in the scene with which I started this text. It takes a lot of effort to resist disciplining the behaviour of pregnant people that comes with this moral reflex to protect the child. In my empirical research, mothers recount the dead baby card being played multiple times. One participant told of a gynaecologist crying out of fear that the child would die if the mother would not consent to induction at 41 weeks, something that would typically qualify as a small risk but apparently one big enough to scare this doctor into tears. Another example was from a mother whose doctors insisted that she got a preventative IV, as otherwise the child might die, they said, in a situation that almost does not even qualify as risky. Another mother told of being pressured into using preventative anti-psychotics through her doctor's insinuation that she might otherwise harm her newborn child – a playing of the dead baby card in which the accusation of infanticide is barely hidden (van der Waal and van Nistelrooij, 2024). These mothers were emotionally blackmailed with the potential death of their children, and with the suggestion that this would be their fault if they did not comply with the proposed course of action. The playing of the dead baby card not only manipulates the pregnant person through what is presumed most dear to her; it also functions as a justification for obstetric violence after the fact, uttered as something along the lines of ‘otherwise your baby would have died’. The playing of the dead baby card after the obstetric violence has already happened reveals not only that the life of the baby is deemed more important than, and also mutually exclusive from, the wellbeing of the mother, but also that the mother cannot really complain about what she has experienced. To do so renders her a ‘bad mother’, who would put her needs before the very life of her child – as if it is not possible to provide safe and respectful care. Importantly, the dead baby card does not really function like a warning or statement of facts, but as a justification of obstetric violence through an accusation: if we do/had done as you want/wanted, your baby will die/would have died; is that what you want? The dead baby card hence reveals that we expect maternal sacrifice in the form of maternal (self-)negation, and that if it is not gifted it is taken, since the subjectivity of pregnant people became a moral threat as it is constructed as mutually exclusive from the biopolitical project of fostering and protecting the child's life.

When a dead baby or abortion is constructed as a biopolitical taboo for which the mother is responsible, the negation of the subjectivity of people with the capacity for pregnancy that is effectuated through this accusation is almost invisible and so normalised that it is the opposite of a taboo: sacrifice of subjectivity in the form of effacement is constituted as the moral expectation, thus closer to necropolitics than biopolitical subjectification. Below, I trace this for the maternal negative, destructive part of the bio- and necropolitics of reproduction to the period of primitive accumulation and the early modern accusation of infanticide that was used to try and execute mothers and midwives during the witch hunts.

The primitive accumulation of reproduction through the accusation of infanticide during the European witch hunts

According to Foucault's analysis, biopower emerged in the eighteenth century and strengthened in the nineteenth century through the development of liberalism, the emergence of state institutions, demographics and the production of ‘knowledge’ about evolution, the population, biology and ‘race’. But theorists such as Federici and Alliez and Lazzarato argue that biopower, which emerged alongside and in relation to capitalism, could never have developed without the processes of primitive accumulation that established capitalism starting in the fifteenth century (Federici, 2004: 15; Alliez and Lazzarato, 2016: 72). The Marxist concept of primitive accumulation refers to the first expropriation of common land into private capital, and work into waged labour, as essential for the further accumulation of capital – primitive accumulation is thus a precondition of capitalism, since capitalism was only able to develop through a primary concentration of labour and capital. This necessarily required the separation of the worker from the means of production, making them dependent on a wage, precarious and prone to exploitation (Federici, 2004: 62–63). Understanding capitalism as racial capitalism importantly adds that an essential element of primitive accumulation was the colonial conquest of land and the enslavement of Black and indigenous people to do unwaged labour (Robinson, 2000). The historical process of primitive accumulation is hence the foundation of present-day relations in racial capitalism.

Federici (2004) argues that violence against women effectively ties the development of capitalism and biopolitics together during the witch hunts. She shows that primitive accumulation was only possible when women's positions within the community were destroyed, as they often occupied central functions overseeing ‘demographic’ domains such as reproduction and healing (Federici, 2004: 63–64). To break communities, expropriate the commons and force people into an individualised existence of waged labour, women's knowledge and collective power had to be dismantled. This was done during the witch hunts by striking fear into women, and fear of women into men, thereby strengthening the gender dichotomy and gendered power relations. Federici lays bare how the witch-hunts amounted to a primitive accumulation, not only of land and labour, but of reproduction – adding to Marx’ famous thesis (Federici, 2004). In the witch hunts, the primitive accumulation of capital as the expropriation of land and labour power through diminishing the power of women, and the primitive accumulation of reproductive bodies come together. According to Federici (2004), the primitive accumulation of the reproductive body was hence a pre-condition for the establishment of our distinctly modern mode of economic production that is capitalism.² But, as she convincingly shows, the witch hunts did not only function as a foundation of capitalism but also as the foundation of biopolitics, through the expropriation and instrumentalisation of the reproductive body through which the next generation could be produced.

The witch hunts spanned a long 300 years. Out of the demographic panic that resulted from the Black Death, in the period between 1435 and 1487, twenty-eight treatises on witchcraft appeared. In 1450, the first witch trials took place in Southern France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy. The last executions and the last trial took place in 1792 and 1820 respectively – well into the Enlightenment and Foucault's dating of the birth of biopower. There are differing estimates as to the total number of women tried as witches. Brian Levack (2015) argues that it could have been no more than 45,000 killed and 90,000 prosecuted, while the feminist historian Anne Barstow (1994) argues that it could have been no fewer than a 100,000 killed and 200,000 prosecuted. The exact number does not indicate the effect that the witch hunts had on women's lives, however, since the suspicion of witchery was widespread and effective.

Witches were seen as an existential threat that had to be faced ‘head-on’ with all the ‘judicial power that European states could muster’ (Barstow, 1994: 23). Women came under severe state surveillance, being forced to register when they were pregnant, when they miscarried and when their children were born. While women in general were targeted by the witch hunts, there was a more specific narrative concerning pregnancy and childbearing, in which mothers and midwives figured centrally (Barstow, 1994). The knowledge and practices of midwives and healers regarding contraception and abortion were forbidden, resulting in women having more children from younger ages onwards than had been the case in the Middle Ages (Federici, 2004: 88–89). The theoretical discourse surrounding the witch hunts was full of metaphors, ideas and suspicions concerning the maternal: poisoned breastmilk, pregnancies from the devil, perverse types of infanticide, the evil nature of one's children and extravagant means of devilish conception featured in the myths on witches (Barstow, 1994; Federici, 2004). The accusation of the killing, cursing or sacrificing of children to the devil played an essential role in the accusation, conviction and justification of women tried as witches.

Specifically, the accusation of infanticide was the main reason for women not trie as witches to be executed: ‘more women were executed for infanticide in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe than for any other crime, except for witchcraft, a charge that also centred on the killing of children and other violations of reproductive norms’ (Federici, 2004: 88–89). In the Malleus Maleficarum, which was the most famous treatise on how to hunt and try witches, first published in 1486 but reprinted through the whole of Europe until the end of the seventeenth century, whole sections are devoted to midwives, such as: ‘Question 11: Midwives who work harmful magic kill foetuses in the womb in different ways, procure a miscarriage, and, when they do not do this, offer newly born children to evil spirits’:

when they do not kill the little children, they curse them and offer them to the evil spirits in the following manner: As soon as the child is born […], the midwife carries the child out of the room as though she were going to set about reviving it, and, lifting it up to the prince of evil spirits (namely Lucifer), they offer it as a sacrifice to all the evil spirits. (This takes place in the kitchen above the fire) (Maxwell-Stuart, 2007:92–93).

The persecution of witches on the charge of infanticide introduced severe penalties into the legal codes for reproductive crimes, thus expropriating women's control over pregnancy and childbearing, appropriating reproduction as a state matter (Federici, 2004: 86–87). Around the mid-sixteenth century, European states ‘began to impose the severest penalties against contraception, abortion and infanticide’: ‘In France, a royal edict of 1556 required women to register every pregnancy, and sentenced to death those whose infants died before baptism after a concealed delivery, whether or not proven guilty of any wrongdoing’, including both late and early miscarriages (Federici, 2004: 88). Infanticide, which included abortion (as provoked and as miscarriage) at the time, became a crimen exceptum, punished with the death penalty, even when the child was stillborn (Federici, 2004). It was regarded as a crime ‘so dangerous to the civil community that the very accusation acted to suspend traditional procedural protection to the defendant and opened the way for the most ruthless and thorough kind of prosecution, undertaken to protect the state from its most dangerous enemies’ (Barstow, 1994: 135).

In various European states, women only became legal citizens to be able to charge them for infanticide; in other words, (potential) maternal subjects gained legal subjecthood to accuse them of killing their children, thus expropriating the control of reproduction from the maternal (Barstow, 1994). Here, the contradiction forced upon maternal subjectivity clearly comes to the fore: mothers were only recognised as subjects through the accusation of killing their children. Women’s subjecthood is thus founded upon the accusation of infanticide, revealing modern maternal subjectivity to be dependent on an age-old play of the dead baby card. Through the charge of infanticide as a matter of punitive justice, the state gained the power to foster life by directly ‘protecting’ the child from the body of its mother. This primitive accumulation of future life destroys what the maternal subject is constituted by in the same move as its subjectivity is granted: from a relationality able to bring forth life, the maternal subject is constituted as a dangerous and individuated receptacle of life, no longer the one capable of creating life on her own terms but now living under the threat of execution for potentially revoking life. When the child became configured biopolitically as the life to be fostered par excellence, the maternal as a subject with responsibility and autonomy over reproduction became primitively accumulated as a captive: the one from whom life is delivered. The accusation of infanticide hence results in the ‘capture’ and negation of the maternal as instrumental for the new biopolitical aspirations of emerging capitalist society (James, 2021). European mothers gained legal adulthood by virtue of the biopolitical aim to control reproduction, as they entered the public domain of justice through a particular patriarchal configuration of justice in reproduction, wherein they became constructed as always criminalisable. The expropriation of the maternal relation to her potential offspring through the charge of infanticide and the execution of people with the capacity for pregnancy as a matter of justice was the primitive accumulation for the further expropriation of the maternal relation to her potential child that intensified throughout modernity.

The primitive accumulation of reproduction was not complete, however, if it did not involve isolating the maternal from her other key relation: the one between her and her community of care and knowledge, such as healers, doulas and midwives. One of the traits of maternal subjectivity is the capacity to become pregnant and to give birth, and the sense-making and self-determination thereof. This requires a relationality of support and expertise. The midwife (or traditional birth attendant or doula) providing a network of relations can thus be seen as part of the maternal, since the space and safety she provides are necessary for the maternal to flourish in her capability of giving birth and her capacity to abort, and control her fertility. During the witch hunts, the first attempts were made to control midwifery, either by accusing midwives of being witches or, more importantly, by recruiting them to testify against alleged witches and thus carry out the surveillance of the maternal. It is no coincidence that the first witch trials took place in 1450 and that, in 1452, the first regulations on midwifery were enacted in Germany. As mentioned before, the major theoretical work on witches and how to prosecute them, the Malleus Maleficarum, contains whole chapters specifically devoted to midwives (Maxwell-Stewart, 2007). The regulation of midwifery was thus intimately connected with the attempt to take hold of the maternal.

In order for biopolitics to succeed, the profession of midwifery (which often consisted of a safe space created during a birth by various wise women healers in a midwifery-like role) had to be controlled: ‘Midwives’ involvement in […] reporting on illegitimate births, abortion, anticonception and infanticide increased between 1400 and 1800’ (Marland, 1994: 7). Midwives became obligated to report infanticide, even if it concerned an early miscarriage, to participate in witch hunt tribunals, to examine women publicly to see if they had extra nipples to feed the devil and to search for the mothers of dead children by examining which women were lactating (Barstow, 1994). Midwives who remained resistant to this duty of surveillance were vulnerable to prosecution (Filippini, 1994). Just as women only gained legal citizenship in order to be charged for infanticide, midwifery only became an official profession for the very same reason. Professionalisation was not primarily to regulate midwives’ medical practice but rather to use midwives for the surveillance, and consequently prosecution, of the maternal – indeed to make midwives carry out reproductive policing. The primitive accumulation of reproduction, achieved through the accusation of infanticide, could thus only be completed through also expropriating a relation of care essential to the maternal that facilitated her relational autonomy into one of control, surveillance, and complicity to maternal captivity. The severance of these two key relations for maternal self-determination can be considered the foundation of biopolitics, as the start of modern demographic and reproductive policing.

Death as a signifier: the logic of matricide

This article opened with the contention that obstetric violence is a too irrational, excessive and unnecessary kind of violence to unproblematically fit a biopolitical framework, since biopolitics is concerned with the fostering of life and subjectivity. Obstetric violence is too violating of maternal subjectivity to be merely understood as a disciplinary violence that is constructive of a (however docile) maternal subject. Instead, obstetric violence can, on the basis of the work of Brison (2003), be understood to destroy maternal subjectivity, often resulting in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the paragraph above, I have traced this pattern of negation of the maternal based upon an accusation of infanticide, currently coming most clearly to the fore in the playing of the dead baby card, to the primitive accumulation of the reproductive body during the witch hunts, where there was a literal accusation of infanticide followed by a literal threat of matricide in the form of executions. The closing question is now how to understand this pattern in the light of the reproductive bio- and necropolitics of modernity. On the one hand, it is a logic that works through two signifiers of death or negation, namely the playing of the dead baby card corresponding to the accusation of infanticide and the negation of the mother as a subject corresponding to the threat of matricide, and could as such be considered a strand of necropolitics, where death is the main signifier instead of life. On the other hand, this logic is a consequence of the biopolitical pronatalist investment in the life of the foetus, that is, the fostering and accumulation of the life of the future subject, which differentiates it from the necropolitics of racial capitalism wherein whole racialised marginalised communities, including children, are made vulnerable to premature death (Gilmore, 2007).

Federici argues that the promotion and fostering of life in biopolitics can only be understood in relation to a destruction of other life, the one being ‘a condition for the other’ (2004: 16). Biopolitical measures such as the registration of pregnancies and natality rates, and the institutionalisation of midwifery, did not happen gently; they were interlinked instances in violent processes that catapulted feudal society and its members into modernity. If Foucault had studied the witch hunts, Federici states, he would have realised that the era of violent primitive accumulation is the condition for the birth of biopolitics, and he ‘would have recognized that torture and death can be placed at the service of “life”’ (2004: 16). Following Mbembe (2019), it is possible to conceptualise the maternal as a negated subject constituted through a relation to death instead of life, or, in Federici’s (2004) words, merely at the service of life. While it is recognised that the maternal is the bearer of life, at the same time she is constructed as the one who could kill that life and must, consequently, be threatened with death in order to prevent her from killing. Life is extractively accumulated through her, while at the same time her life is not part of the biopolitical project of fostering life and subjectivity.

Mbembe (2019) theorises how not only life but also death works a signifier in the bio-necropolitics of colonial modernity and its institutions. As elaborated on above, the relation both to the child as well as to the midwife was expropriated through the accusation of infanticide and the following threat of execution. The accusation of infanticide, as a justification for processes of separation and control, is the expression of a logic that, although embedded within biopolitics, only makes ‘sense’ through, and is set in movement by, the threat of death. This threat of death can be understood as threefold, encapsulating all subjects involved in the maternal: (1) the accusation of infanticide; (2) the following threat of execution of mothers; and (3) the following threat of the execution of midwives, and/or their forced complicity in the witch hunts and hence in matricide and maternal captivity. More than merely instrumentalising the maternal, it is the symbolic ‘making die’ of the mother upon the accusation of infanticide which installed death as the signifier of the politics of her de-subjectification. Relating the current playing of the dead baby card to the early modern accusation of infanticide shows that the continuous expropriation of maternal relationality through obstetric violence should not be understood as mitigated through a concept of life, and therefore not as biopolitics, but should be understood as effectuated through the concept of death, closer to Mbembe's (2019) necropolitics, albeit in the service of a fostering of other life.

The crucial difference with necropolitics, however, is that while through colonialism and racism certain groups are marked for death and live in a closer proximity to death, the life of the European mother once targeted by the witch hunts became very much protected after its initial primitive accumulation. But even where there is no literal making die, the negation of maternal subjectivity persists through a continuous play of the dead baby card. This logic resulting in the negation of the maternal is reminiscent of French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray's concept of matricide, wherein she understands Western civilisation as fundamentally rooted in an appropriation and negation of the maternal, which she terms original matricide (Irigaray, 1993; Green, 2012). In Irigaray's (1993) critique on psycho-analytic thought, she problematises that the subjectification of the child requires a primordial rejection of the mother in Western conceptions of subjectivity. Tracing back the play of the dead baby card to the witch hunts, a similar pattern becomes visible where the biopolitical subjectification of life also rests upon an ‘original’ matricide in the form of the prosecution and execution of the maternal as part of the primitive accumulation foundational to biopolitical capitalism. The subjectification of future life is constructed as dependent on the original execution of the maternal, still being echoed in the negation of maternal subjectivity during the birth of the future subject.

Tellingly, in the 1990s, Jo Murphy-Lawless stated about obstetrics: ‘If I were to only extract two words whereby to classify the concerns of contemporary obstetric practice, they would not include birth, but risk and death’ (1998: 229). ‘Birth’ as a former capacity of pregnant people is replaced with ‘risk’ and ‘death’. The installation of a politics that uses death, specifically infanticide, as its main referent still makes reproductive care which is truly affirmative of the maternal hard to come by. The biopolitical fostering of life still rests upon the continuous effectuation of the taboo of death, namely as the accusation of a dead child, upon which the maternal subject is still negated and traumatised. As a result, any assertion of maternal subjectivity seems to threaten the biopolitical project of safely fostering future life since it evokes the threat of death through which maternal subjectivity is negated and controlled – attesting to my own experience as a midwife that taking pregnant people seriously and keeping the foetus safe seem mutually exclusive. The affirmation of the maternal subject in birth, or with regards to abortion or contraception, is already in and of itself a biopolitical transgression since the protection of the future subject is bound up with the negation of the maternal. This means that the practice of playing the dead baby card in birth is not only a manipulation technique. It is not only a tactic used to make mothers comply. It is rather the making explicit of the borders of the biopolitical subjectification of life; it is a warning for the taboo of the child's death if you cross over.

Rather than a necropolitics that threatens the life of mothers and their children, which would be a ‘true’ necropolitics, matricide can be recognised as part and parcel of the modern bio-necro configuration of reproduction as the constitutive border of the project of biopolitical subjectification, which is the extractive instrumentalisation of the maternal body and the negation of maternal subjectivity. Because the death, or the termination, of future life is the direct contradiction, and thus the taboo, the limit, the excess, of biopolitics, the project of subjectification must exclude the maternal in order to be able to accumulate and control reproduction directly, subjecting her, instead, to a de-subjectifying politics that functions through the signifier of death instead of life, and is a kind of necropolitics that I have differentiated as matricide.³ Although the playing of the dead baby card no longer consists of the actual threat of matricide as it did during the witch hunts, it still constructs maternal self-determination as a transgression of the biopolitical project of fostering life. As such, the playing of the dead baby card still expropriates and captures the maternal subject, echoing its primitive accumulation through the continuous implicit accusation of infanticide.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Rodante van der Waal

Notes

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