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.