Containment

Twinning the aborted foetus and death row prisoner as subjects in extremis , this article attempts to reconcile my own experiences and place them within a broader ethical framework. I argue that there is substantial moral ambiguity in whom we choose to privilege for survival or destroy that undermines a definitive pro-life or pro-choice position, as those concepts are commonly understood. My primary argument is that there are always exceptions to rules, to cases, to experiences that need to be acknowledged and considered alongside the power relations that come with the right to define and decide who lives and dies. This is an interrogation of my own moral parameters, written throughout pregnancy with children who went on to live, and an examination of my own bias and fear of causing or experiencing suffering that informed my previous abortion. Technological intervention is troubling the concepts of what constitutes ‘living’ and ‘dying’ – to what counts as ‘life’. Technologies that keep the moribund infant alive are creating a liminal space where subjects hang in between life and death so that our concept of both may need to be redefined to include ‘a living death’, akin to a life spent on Death Row.