Carpenter's Pro-Life - Abortion Scene

There is a scene that has interested us in Carpenter’s Pro-Life: the spectacle of abortion enacted by a man on another man. The prolifer performs a revenge-operation on the obstetrician, showing the monstrosity of Prolife, the ultimate punishment of transgressing the moral code of religious fundamentalism. Because he is a guardian agent of morality with his army of agents - the sons. 

Nevertheless there is another aspect maybe less obvious that is conceptually performed alongside this abortion, which is the monstrosity of the Western scientific paradigm. A doctor, an obstetrician is being bodily penetrated, he is the one who's body is now riddled with an 'artificial hole' (see Sobchack-Baudrillard controversy). It's the physical abortion enacted by a man on another man which performs the monstrosity of the Western thought besides the insanity of Prolife or the monstrosity of keeping moral values at all costs - the selfbirth in the masculine imagination.

Western science answers the masculine fantasy of selfbirth through rational acquisition - the mind replacing the womb as the site of creation. (Rosi Braidotti referring to Donna Haraway) 

Now the mind is being replaced again with the body, the womb is now an 'artificial orifice' - it is as if the medical objects have gone crazy, it is a semiotic transgression whereby the objects lose their function, an experiment producing horror rather than truth - as it normally does in the modern scientific mode of production of truth.

So it's a double effect, a double revenge, not only showing the insanity of Prolife but the cruelty of medico-scientific paradigm - based on vivisection, dissection, cutting, bleeding, removing, digging holes, penetrating, peeling, scanning, piercing, sticking. And here we can add from Sobchack quoting Baudrillard to distort a bit the controversy of postmodern technophilia in the detriment of the body: 'brutal surgery' 'continually performed in creating incisions, excisions, scartissue, gaping body holes', 'artificial orifices'. These are the operations that animated the horrors of science starting with the Cartesian tradition on and on. Of course the main performers of this splatter of medico-scientific apparatus are men.

This scene seems to affect us as viewers in multiple ways, escaping a single identification pattern and beyond the dissatisfaction/gratification binary. This is the most probably unintended side effect of the monstrous scene, apart from criticizing the Prolife war scenes by pushing the limits of representation and employing the excess of artifice. Not only religion but scientific thought as well can produce the performance of horror.

The doctor in Carpenter’s Pro-Life can be seen as a trickster in the field of science: ignoring the rules of the game (disembodiment, which is another word for objectivity), he’s ready to take it on the chin, or to be more precise on all his body, the only protecting shield to keep away his sweat and blood is the bulletproof vest (in the film the obstetrician was wearing this vest - sign of the ongoing fear of religious fundamentalism). In a way he's not modest, if we think of Donna Haraway's modest witness, in that he's not invisible, so the abortion crusader punishes him for this hybris of lack of modesty. The attack on the clinic is a prolongation of a scientific experiment in which the doctor is polluted by his own body.

The abortionist's fleshy endeavors in the world of science recall the tension in feminist and technology debates of the last decades between a situated embodiment called for by a strand of feminist discourse (including Vivian Sobchack) and the disembodied world of cyber-science, celebrated by the utopianists of cyberspace or how Parisi called them the cowboys of cyberspace. Parisi is proposing overcoming this dichotomy, as in fact it has already been scrambled to pieces by our bio-digital capitalist culture, in which borders between technology and biology have been blown out. With the emergence of synthetic biology, cloning, in vitro fertilization,etc, this continous merry-go-round between what is called biology and what is called technology is producing molecular mutations, monstruos hybrids, uncanny cellular encounters, raising questions about what a body is and what a body can do, blurring the lines between natural and artificial.