The Modern Greek Foetus

Writing from the vantage point of the America of Bush and Bill Frist, in which the banning not only of abortion but also of many forms of contraception seems a distinct possibility, it is refreshing to read about a place where abortion rights are not imminently under threat. One might think that such a place would be considered a bastion of rational ‘modernity’ when compared with the embrace of an imagined ‘tradition’ or ‘good old days’ of the US Christian right. But as Heather Paxson and Alexandra Halkias vividly illustrate in their ethnographies, the politics of what garners the label ‘modern’ and what ‘backwards’ continues to be linked to power and wealth. Those countries on the ‘margins of Europe’ or worse are forever in the position of playing catch-up to the West, perennially finding the Golden Fleece of ‘modernity’ just beyond their grasp. Why should this be, and what do reproductive choices have to do with national identities? Two new works by anthropologists, both based on fieldwork in Athens in the mid1990s, explore the tangled web of gender/nation/modernity through the lens of abortion, contraceptive practices, assisted conception and the politics of reproduction in the broadest sense. These works complement each other in numerous ways, but they also diverge significantly—in their writing style, methodologies, focus and how they choose to contextualize their ‘explanations’ for practices related to controlling reproduction in contemporary Greece. Taken together, they provide an indictment of nationalist concerns with the ‘population question’ (to dimographiko), as well as of the unexamined gendered assumptions that lie behind much of this discourse.