Biopower, Necropolitics, and the Afterlives of Infants: Uncovering the Ethics of Historical Anatomical Collections
AI Summary
Anatomical collections historically included fetuses and infants taken from marginalised populations, raising unresolved ethical questions about their origins and use.
Applying biopower and necropolitics reveals how medicine, colonial policy, and eugenic sentiment regulated reproductive bodies and assigned differential worth.
This produced higher infant mortality, loss of bodily autonomy, suppressed grief, and the erasure of personhood that extends structural violence into postmortem histories.
Am J Biol Anthropol. 2026 Jun;190(2):e70294. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.70294.
ABSTRACT
OBJECTIVES: In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many fetuses and infants were collected for anatomical study. Yet little research has explored their origins or the ethical implications of holding and using these individuals in teaching and research.
MATERIALS AND METHODS: This paper reviews the literature on fetal and infant skeletal collections and presents a case study from the W. D. Trotter Anatomy Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand that uses the lens of biopower and necropolitics to examine the acquisition and use of these individuals in anatomical education. This model highlights how societal and institutional powers and medicine regulate reproductive bodies and determine the perceived worth of fetuses and infants within specific cultural, historical, and medical contexts.
RESULTS: This case study shows that individuals were often acquired from marginalized populations-unwed parents, the impoverished, and institutionalized women-whose reproductive autonomy was politically and socially negated. The paper explores how biopower and the necropolitics of reproduction in colonial New Zealand operated to control populations and individuals.
DISCUSSION: Biopower and the necropolitics of reproduction were enacted through eugenic sentiment, structural inequality in healthcare, alongside medical and institutional control over the living and the dead. This contributed to higher infant mortality for marginalized mothers and infants, a loss of autonomy over the fate of deceased bodies, and the suppression of grief. The anatomization of fetuses rendered them objects of scientific value, whilst simultaneously erasing their personhood and socio-historical context, thus extending the structural violence their families experienced during life into their postmortem “life” history (necro-violence).
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