Project Details
Projekt
Fault Lines of Generativity: A Narrative Bioethics-Based Analysis of Generative Future in the Context of Infertility, Pregnancy Loss, and Abortion
Applicant
Dr. Isabella Marcinski-Michel
Subject Area
Practical Philosophy
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424883170
The sub-project will focus on modes of non-reproduction such as infertility, pregnancy loss and abortion. It will examine the extent to which these are narrated as forms of loss and renunciation with regard to a generative future and reflected in the context of a good life in time. The focus on subjective experiences of the disruption of generativity adds an important aspect to contemporary debates in the ethics of reproductive medicine. It also enables a specific reflection on the concept of generativity, which is the focus of the second funding period of the FOR. For example, biological, social and disease-related infertility, raises questions about the loss or renunciation of an individual generative future, which can be answered in different ways. Pregnancy loss marks a break with an assumed teleological time structure of pregnancy and leads to the loss of an anticipated future. Abortion is preceded by reflection and a decision on the realization of a future with this specific child, which is renounced. With a hermeneutic-narrative method and, following approaches from narrative bioethics, the sub-project will explore narratives of infertility, pregnancy loss and abortion in literature, film and television with regard to the significance of a generative future for a good life in time and examine them for ambivalences and counter-narratives. The theoretical and methodological recourse to narrative bioethics opens up the possibility of describing the diversity of experiences of loss and renunciation, conceptualizing them and making them suitable for the ethical debate. Finally, the sub-project also aims to critically analyse the potentials and limitations of the approach for medical ethics and bioethics, as well as to strengthen ethical questions in the research field of medical humanities.
DFG Programme
Research Units
