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This article compares the perspectives of Foucault and Agamben on biopolitics. The dichotomy normality/deviance is central to Foucault's analyses of modern subjectivities, while the Sovereign/Homo sacer dichotomy has a similar position according to Agamben. Are modern subjectivities shaped by a disciplining power, operating through some rather stable and fixed standards and norms, or are they exposed to continuously defined states of exceptions, in which the moral and social order are declared irrelevant and not valid? Agamben states that in modernity the distinction between the normal and the exception is fundamentally blurred, and therefore the normal human condition is to be held hostage to a sovereignty making pure, immanent decisions without any references to stable, recognizable criteria. Are we therefore inscribed into normality, producing ourselves in a machinic way, or are we exposed to complete uncertainty, stripping our social existence down to bare human life or the status of Homo sacer?There is striking flexibility and plasticity in defining human deviance Á/ not only from the perspective of the last century, but from that of the last ten years. This is far from trivial, both for the individuals who are placed within the historical floating categories and for society; there is much at stake. The expertise operates directly on human bodies by conferring or removing value, and cuts into psychologies by categorizing existential conditions such as deviance. This means that they no longer have something important or privileged to tell us, but become defect misunderstandings. At the same time professional gazes become fundamentally unpredictable because of their shifting and roaming character. We do not know how or what they will see next year Á/ what categories that will spring up, their scope or how they will be practised. This leads to a common feeling of being exposed. Who will be captured next time, in what way and by what consequences? Nobody is in a position to answer these questions. When the borderline between normality and deviance is continually redrawn and with new dimensions, nobody can be assured of remaining on the right side of it. Instead we become nascent and vulnerable.

This article is about selective abortion. It concentrates on the existential, moral and social conditions that arise when pregnant women, using prenatal diagnosis (PND), are told that there is something seriously wrong with the foetuses that they are carrying. This is characterised as a micro state of emergency, where both normal cognitive categories and normative orders are dissolved. The analyses are anchored in the womens' own presentations and understandings of the processes and dilemmas related to the abortion decisions, and our most important empirical materials are interviews with women who have experienced them. Our main ambition is to show the relation between some important dimensions of the situation in which the abortion decision has to be made, and the special kind of authority on behalf of the women that presents itself. Of equal importance is the vulnerability of the pregnant women, resulting in a co-production of the women as both Sovereigns and Homo Sacer in the decision situation. We also analyse some of the experienced relations between the women and the foetuses, and how the women constitute themselves as moral subjects, with a particular emphasis on the motifs of sacrifice and self-sacrifice. It is a central argument in the article that we have to understand the specificity of the decision situation, without reducing it either to other phases (before or after) of the total processes of PND and selective abortion, or to general discourses of disability or normality. The specificity of the situation in which the abortion decision is made is a pivotal point in society's regulation (in a broad sense) of the field and in the constitution of the regime of selective abortion.

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