ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the uses to which women’s and men’s bodies may be put, and the meanings inscribed upon them, in death and dying. Its starting point is the observation that the appropriation of the bodies of deeply comatose, persistently vegetative and brain stem dead pregnant women as foetal incubators is ethically problematic and, politically, to be fiercely resisted.1 Law’s acquiescence in this essentially futile, necrophiliac pursuit of potential ‘life’ stands out in sharp relief to the protection it accords to the reproductive products of a dead male provider. In the UK, the response of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to Diane Blood’s relatively innocuous request to be inseminated with her husband’s illegally stored sperm unleashed a macabre campaign of reproductive absolutism in which the spectral, disembodied form of the late Stephen Blood acquired an almost corporeal presence. Systematically effacing her own desires and her own agency in their pursuit, I will argue that, Blood’s victory does nothing to realign gender relations. Instead, it represents a sentimental attempt to reconstruct the biological nuclear family in which, ironically, it is the woman who is rendered invisible. Tellingly, in popular discourse, though not in this paper, the term ‘posthumous pregnancy’ evokes a curious image of reproductive capacity which survives not the death of a woman, but a man.
