Beyond the law, different institutions gatekeep the access to medically assisted reproduction in France. Although a shift in the moral regimes underlying French reproductive governance can be observed with the recent opening of access to ART treatments to single women and same-sex female couples, French biopolitics regulate ART practices through surveillance mechanisms of which the medical nature conceals its normalising function.
If the exclusion of certain motherhoods is enshrined in the law -as, for example, ‘late’ motherhoods with a 43-year limit for access to treatment (a limit that only exist for women)-, a more discreet control is carried out in the privacy of gynaecological consultations. Even if there is no medical and only social reason for the request, the physician, as the embodiment of the medical institution in which the State places the responsibility for the compliance with the law, remains the gatekeeper to the reproductive treatment’s pathway. Indeed, he or she will have to decide whether his or her patients meet the ‘right’ conditions to reproduce. Still far from being liberalised, the regulation of this practice shows us how bodies, the family and reproduction continue to be intersected and modulated by diverse institutions, among which the medical institution.
In the framework of the French health system, woman and couples who do not correspond to the norm are prevented from forming a family through ART. Faced with reproductive exclusion, thousands of French women and couples cross the Spanish border to access ART treatments each year. Based on ethnographic data from over seven years of participant observation and in-depth interviews, this presentation will reflect on the physicians’ role in the health surveillance mechanisms, and it will show how French women and couples circumvent and negotiate with the reproductive governance of the French health system.
