Summary:

My dissertation examines how termination of pregnancy after prenatal diagnosis is authorized, managed and experienced at the nexus of law, biomedicine and everyday lives in Denmark. As the first ethnographic study of selective abortion in Denmark, the dissertation brings attention to dimensions of selective reproduction that have hitherto been undertheorized, moving from a focus on reproductive decision-making to a focus on what it takes to bring deaths of fetuses deemed anomalous about, and its moral and social impact. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic
fieldwork amongst abortion committee members, health care professionals and women and their partners, the dissertation unearths intersecting realms of the Danish welfare state involved in the making of death in the beginning of life.
The overall argument of the dissertation is that everyone involved in the making of death through abortion divides and distributes the moral burden and responsibility for death to mitigate the moral discomfort associated with terminating life. I propose to categorize this as “moral labor,” understood as processes that aim to legitimize and stabilize ambiguous and unsettling decisions and actions. Moral labor is essential for legal and health care professionals “to get the job done” day after day, and it is essential for couples to reconcile and live with the chosen loss it
has invoked. The larger story that I chronicle regards how the Danish welfare state produces (ideal) citizens and sets boundaries around who belongs to the state, cracking open insights
into how selective abortion has become the dominant contemporary normative ‘choice’. The dissertation has relevance for many constituencies, such as members of the regional abortion committees and the Abortion Appeals Board, abortion providers, women and their partners, policy makers and politicians, and social science scholars and students.