Биополитика на раждането: Мишел Фуко, Групата за здравна информация и борбата за правото на аборт
The Biopolitics of Birth: Michel Foucault, the Groupe Information Santé and the Abortion Rights Struggle

Summary/Abstract: This piece is an edited and abridged excerpt from Chapter Six of Foucault: The Birth of Power, Polity Press, 2017. It discusses the work of the Groupe Information Santé, an activist organisation established in France in 1972 on the model of the more famous Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons. The GIS comprised doctors, sociologists and philosophers, and its most famous member was Michel Foucault. There were many projects that the group worked on, including industrial accidents and sickness, the health of immigrants, and the struggle for abortion rights. Drawing on their publications, pamphlets, archival material and news reports, this piece discusses the importance of the group, especially concerning reproductive rights and sexual politics more generally. One of the group’s key aims was to provide people with free access to information so they could make informed choices. The piece therefore provides another example of Foucault’s involvement in radical activism in the early 1970s, though his was only one voice in the movement and it stresses the collaborative nature of the project.

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