In addition to being a universal practice, abortion is legal in most western countries. This fact, which has introduced it in the public sphere, does not nevertheless prevent it from being confined in the space reserved for the informal, and this as a consequence of a tacit pact, of bad social faith.
Relying on a hundred observations made in clinical settings and forty in-depth talks with women who have gone through the experience of abortion, in addition to data taken from history and anthropology, Luc Boltanski explains that rejection. Abortion must remain in the shadow because it reveals a contradiction present in the very core of the social contract: the one that opposes the principle of the singularity of beings to the postulate of its replaceable nature, without which no society would be able to demographically renew itself.
Luc Boltanski is then focused on raising the issue of engendering and analyzing the essentially symbolic restrictions that preside over the entry of human beings into society - antinomic restrictions that tend to be blurred by the effect of different types of social arrangement. What constitutes the human being is not the fetus, which is inscribed in the body, but its symbolic adoption. However, such adoption implies the possibility of discriminating between an otherwise indistinguishable set of embryos. On the social level, and sometimes on the individual level, the arbitrary nature of this discrimination becomes difficult to bear. As Luc Boltanski shows, the contradiction becomes bearable through a kind of categorical grammar: the fetus-project - whom the parents, thanks to the word, adopt and welcome as a new being by providing a name - the fetus opposes- tumor, that is, the accidental embryo not called to become the object of a vital project.
Grammar, related experience and historical perspective come together in this work to turn the practice of abortion, admitted for decades as a politically legal action, into an experience destined to be, from now on, socially audible.