Bergson and Reproductive Justice: Critiquing Boundary-Drawing around Race and the Individual

Several of the most acute social problems in the U.S. intersect in the domain of reproductive justice (RJ). Considerations about choice and autonomy, our relationships with the natural world, current and historical dynamics of power and oppression, and ethical use of new (bio)technologies all converge when we begin to ask fundamental questions about what reproduction is, what it should be, and who gets to decide.

In what follows, I engage the thought of Henri Bergson in relation to reproductive justice. Specifically, I want to highlight two of the strands in Bergsonian thought that I believe can be helpful in contributing to RJ’s critique of white supremacist and Western power structures that oppress people of color through reproductive means. These are: (1) The ways that Bergson sees the tendency of intelligence to pick out artificial boundaries around things in the world and around ideas because of its intention to act on them, and (2) the inherent opposition of the tendencies toward individuation and reproduction. The remainder of this piece will reflect on these theories through engagement with an issue of constrained reproduction in the setting of environmental injustice. I argue that Bergsonian thought can not only contribute a facet to the critique, but also offer alternative conceptual frames to assist in thinking about how to formulate corrective measures to this injustice.

Apparent Conflicts in Reproductive Justice

The RJ movement arose through the efforts of feminists of color, particularly Black Americans, who found traditional feminist approaches to reproductive rights both lacking and limiting. Reproductive rights and choice, as a movement developed from white women’s perspectives, focuses almost exclusively on privacy and rights to autonomy and freedom from undue government interference. Its version of reproductive freedom tends to assume access to power and resources that many people of color and low-income people do not have. A fuller account of reproductive freedom—the account that RJ offers—takes stock of wider contextual factors of power, privilege, history, and access to resources in advocating for legal and policy changes that would create truly free reproductive choice situations for all, especially the most oppressed. The RJ framework has many advantages over a traditional feminist reproductive rights or choice approach, as the former works to account for civil and social rights beyond just privacy or bodily autonomy and is sensitive to the ways in which choice situations are impacted by power, privilege, and social constraints.

That RJ is an improvement over previous framings of reproductive rights is a relatively familiar argument to anyone interested in recent reproductive law and politics literature; however, attempts to solve the “sticky” questions in RJ often run up against conflicts between fundamental priorities. For instance, the social and moral valences of protecting the reproductive choice to abort fetuses that genetic screening has labeled intellectually disabled mobilize arguments about parental autonomy on the one hand and disability justice on the other. Many authors have done deep and important work on these sorts of conflicts and what produces them, mapping social dynamics and historical pressures that help us to understand what assumptions we make and why.

As I have studied the literature and attempted to organize and integrate these authors’ vital insights, I have begun to sense that many of these apparent conflicts arise from fundamental misunderstandings of the distinctions and the relationships between humans and nonhuman nature (both living and non-living) and between living and nonliving things. Ideologically, Western society has drawn bright lines between and around these concepts (separating “living” from “inert,” for example, or separating stages of pregnancy based on “potential” or “personhood”). These lines are then used to define distinct categories which we can explore, manipulate, and debate in attempts to discover fundamental principles we can use to evaluate moral, legal, and societal situations and choices.

Bergson and Intellect

Broadly, this process I have just described comprises a large part of the intellectual work humans have been doing for millennia. We tend to define, categorize, and manipulate. As Henri Bergson argues, intelligence is our fundamental adaptation, and its processes work well for us when we use them on inert matter. Human intellect gives us the tools we need to discover facts and laws in the physical universe that we can then predict and leverage to our advantage. We have built palaces, both of stone and of knowledge, using the power of intellect.

However, one of Bergson’s essential contentions—echoing predecessors such as Baruch Spinoza and reflected in the work of contemporary scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz, Nikolas Rose, and Jane Bennett—is that the nature of reality (all that there is) encompasses more than just the physical matter of the universe; there is also the constant motion and flux of duration and the tendencies and real creativity of evolutionary movement.

Bergson contends in Creative Evolution that when we transplant the intellectual method that was specifically evolved for apprehending and manipulating inert matter onto the study of the non-material aspects of the universe—time, for example, or the evolutionary movement of life itself—we make a mistake, because manipulations that work fine on matter fall short when applied to non-material reality. We cannot expect a tool (intellect) developed to work on matter to work just as well when we begin thinking beyond matter and considering the nature of reality and life itself; intellect—with its categorizations and divisions and bright borders between them—is not sufficient. We must understand the ways in which our intellect misleads us into thinking that we can manipulate all non-material aspects of our reality in the same way that we do with matter (with borders and categories) in order to get closer to a true understanding of what is and should be. (Indeed, even this border between “material” and “nonmaterial” is suspect, though that complex topic is beyond the scope of this piece.) This understanding of what is—this more accurate apprehension of what life is as it pertains to humans, nonhumans, and nonliving things—is vital for a true understanding of the relationships among these things and the principles that should govern those relationships.

A deeper dive into Bergsonian philosophy can be instructive in the task of revising the assumptions and language we often use to talk about the political setting of reproductive issues. These assumptions, based as they are in a worldview steeped in white supremacy and the devaluation of the knowledge, experiences, and lives of people of color (particularly, in the United States, of Black people) do not provide an adequate foundation on which to build a full and expansive politics of RJ. Bergson’s understanding of what life is and how consciousness interacts with—indeed, is “launched into” (181)—inert matter can help us more accurately theorize human reproduction; with this, we will be able to ground our assessments of problems in reproductive politics, and our solutions to them, within perspectives that better account for the mobile and continuous nature of life itself with its interpenetrations and blurred boundaries. Until we understand and can practice this, what Bergson calls our usual way of understanding the world—through intellect—will continue to mislead many of us into thinking that justice can be achieved if we just cut out and rearrange the pieces enough and in the right configuration.

Constrained Reproduction

In her article “The Dysgenic State: Environmental Injustice and Disability-Selective Abortion Bans,” Khiara Bridges examines the intersection of polices which locate environmental hazards which are known to produce birth defects among communities of color with laws which prohibit abortions on the grounds that the fetus has been diagnosed with a disabling condition. Bridges argues that this is an inversion of the early 20^th century’s fascination with eugenics and proceeds from the same impulse; instead of trying to “purify” the bodies of the white and elite classes, however, it is an attempt to produce impairment in the bodies of the nonwhite and underclass populations. Bridges calls this the dysgenic state, a political entity steeped in white supremacist ideology which pushes hazardous waste onto nonwhite communities and then privatizes responsibility for the resulting impairments—the state facilitates the production of a problem, blames the impacted for their situation, and denies them the means to exercise freedom of choice in their reproduction.

The problem does not end there, however; while disability-selective abortion bans are a species of reproductive control which opponents of reproductive rights wish to exercise over the bodies of those who can become pregnant, the focus on disability does tie to important concerns about the status of disabled individuals in our society and the conceptions of what disability is and what it means to live a life as a disabled person. The devaluation of the lives that disabled people live is a pressing problem, and one that often informs a prospective parent’s decision whether to continue a pregnancy when the fetus has been diagnosed with a disabling condition. Attitudes about disability and the value of a disabled life, as well as the current limited visibility of people living disabled lives, have a large impact on the legal and policy resources devoted (or not devoted) to removing socially imposed obstacles to disabled people’s full participation in society. This is especially true for disabled people of color, who face additional and intersectional challenges to full social and political participation.

As noted above, however, tensions can arise between advocates of reproductive rights and disability justice. RJ, situated as it is at the intersection of these and other issues of freedom, care, and wellbeing, can encounter difficulty in dealing with these tensions. Sometimes, solutions that are offered tend to drill down on fundamentals—either all abortion must be allowed at any time and for any reason, or the devaluation of disabled lives evinced through disability-selective abortions must be prohibited. Obviously many advocates take a more measured approach than either of these options and do an admirable job of holding conflicting commitments in tension and deeply considering the wellbeing of all parties and populations involved; my point is that, in thinking about these issues, these are the terms and strong foundational commitments we often start with before softening them to more closely align with justice as understood in the world, in actual circumstances.

These are the sorts of situations in which I believe beginning from different assumptions—from a Bergsonian understanding of the fundamental unity of life and the artifice of intellectualized boundaries—can help us theorize a more accurate account of what justice in reproduction is and what we can do to promote it which may be able to avoid these apparent tensions between fundamental commitments. If we begin our thinking from basic premises about the interconnectedness of our lives with other humans, and of humans with the rest of our environment, it will be more apparent how the problems have been produced and what sorts of postures and policies can contribute to their undoing while maintaining a unified commitment to life and wellbeing.

Boundaries, Individuation, and Reproduction

Above I offered a general summary of Bergson’s argument (8–11, 98–99) that intellect is ill-suited for interacting with living things because it evolved to help us make use of inert matter, and matter infused with life is a fundamentally different kind of thing. For the purpose of this piece, I think one aspect of this theory in particular is helpful—Bergson’s explanation that when we perceive borders and boundaries around inert matter (this rock as opposed to that one), it is with the intention of acting on them. For instance, I see borders where I sense that I can use this one in the structure I’m building, but that one’s shape isn’t suited to it. Matter itself, though, is a unity; it is all one thing. The physical laws that we perceive and the separations we draw around different kinds of matter do not have anything to do with the real nature of the things, but only with our intended action on them (196, 221).

When we do this with inert matter, it works well for us. Manipulating matter aids us in creating tools and infrastructure that make our lives better and promote the perpetuation and growth of our species. However, this method of cutting out and rearranging, which our intellect naturally does because it works well on inert matter, can only get us so far when dealing with living things. We see edges on things because we have a plan of action with regard to them, but those edges are artificial and created by us, not an intrinsic part of the thing itself. For Bergson, the boundaries created by nature—the disassociations and individuations necessary for evolution to proceed—are not necessarily contiguous with the boundaries our intellect perceives (188).

I find this misapprehension of boundaries to be especially damaging when these are separations we have artificially drawn around ideas like “race” and “genetic purity.” We can see how this shows up in the dysgenic state’s action on people and environments which have been selected along the artificial boundaries picked out by white supremacist imaginary. Boundaries drawn around race—the larger category of “non-white” as well as specific racial divisions within that category—cut out sections of the population for different treatment by the state. These artificial boundaries are drawn with the intention of acting on the categories encompassed by them, and this action results in physical and social consequences that constrain the lives, freedom, and reproduction of both individuals and communities.

This is particularly true in issues surrounding reproduction, where the trajectory of reproductive rights, rooted as it is in Western ideologies, has historically focused on asserting the right to autonomy of the individual. Thus, the other idea that I believe is key to take from Bergson’s thought is a small, but significant, point he makes in a few passages in Creative Evolution. Bergson concludes that the tendency of life to individuate (to break off into individuals, species, etc.) is never complete or pure and is always accompanied and opposed by the tendency toward reproduction (13). Individuation can never be pure and complete because, in order for an organism to be purely individual, no detached part of it can be able to survive on its own. However, that is exactly what reproduction is. This tension between individuation and reproduction requires an understanding of the human situation that, while valuing the individual, can never take the individual as paramount.

The movement for reproductive rights, which often has not adequately questioned its entanglement with white supremacist assumptions, relies heavily on individual autonomy to structure an understanding of human reproduction. This is not a full representation of what reproduction is and the meaning it holds for us as a species and as living beings. Thus, when we encounter social, political, and legal problems around reproduction, individual solutions (e.g., ones focused only on abortion) will never be sufficient, because of this inherent opposition of individuation and reproduction. An understanding of reproduction as a continuous thread of creative life from and through one individual to the next is indispensable for critiquing failures in current reproductive politics as well as for imagining new and expansive plans for a politics of reproductive justice.

Conclusion

I don’t have space in this piece to develop a new and adequate political structure that solves all of the problems RJ points out; such a task is beyond my individual capabilities in any case. However, I do feel confident in arguing that Bergsonian thought can contribute in important ways to a re-theorization of human reproduction—one that can break down white supremacist boundaries and Western individualism and can provide a framework that is cognizant of the essential unity of life on which to build a just reproductive politics. This is not to say, though, that Bergson is somehow “purely” outside of Western thought; while I find his formulations helpful, they must be subject to critical evaluation to see where they would succeed and where they would fail in helping to de-center Western perspectives.

Turning to Bergson’s ideas can contribute to RJ’s critique of current reproductive policies and can also add nuance and grounding for resolving tensions within RJ itself, such as the tension between disability-selective abortion and disability rights. Commitment to the unity of life and an understanding of inherent tensions between tendencies (like individuation and reproduction) can help us to respond to unique situations in ways that can be sensitive to all of the actors involved. We don’t create justice by cutting the world up into pieces and sewing them back together in a different configuration; we promote justice by stepping away from current assumptions and inserting ourselves into the stream of life to understand our essential connectedness.

Cherí Kruse

Cherí Kruse is a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at the University of California, Berkeley and has an MA in Philosophy from San Francisco State University. She specializes in ethics and moral and political philosophy, and her research focuses on reproductive justice and its intersections with racial, environmental, immigration, and educational justice. Her current project examines conceptual boundaries around human reproduction through analysis of risk and control in pregnancy, birth, and childrearing.