Contesting the Rule of Emotions? The Press and Enforced Caesareans
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900403 |
| Author | Lieve Gies |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
CONTESTING THE RULE OF
EMOTIONS? THE PRESS AND
ENFORCED CAESAREANS
LIEVE GIES
Keele University, UK
ABSTRACT
The mass media are becoming increasingly interested in legal trials. This has led to
concerns that legal rationality could be threatened by an emotionally driven media
spectacle. The dichotomy between emotions and law has recently come to the fore in
the enforced caesarean case of St George’s Healthcare NHS Trust v S [1998]. Study-
ing the press reports on this case, my argument is that maintaining this dichotomy can
produce the undesirable effect of justifying coercive medical treatment of pregnant
women as an authentic, natural and spontaneous response. Emotions in this respect
have to be denaturalized. Coercive surgery for pregnant women is neither a universal
nor a necessary response, but one that has to be situated in its appropriate ideologi-
cal, cultural and philosophical context. This requires attention to be focused on the
fluidity and possible interconnections of law and emotions, and not so much on their
polarity and mutual exclusion.
INTRODUCTION
RECENTLY there has been a series of high-profile trials across
Europe (for example, the murder cases of young children in France,
the UK and Belgium) and in the United States (for example, Mike
Tyson and O. J. Simpson) raising concerns that the news media are unduly
interfering with the administration of justice. For example, the ubiquitous
presence of cameras and reporters in the trial of O. J. Simpson has led to
claims that the media had a fundamental impact on the outcome of the
entire case (Thaler, 1997). Commentators in France fear that the growing
interest that journalists have in sensational trials amounts to usurpation:1
in their view, the role of judges is taken over by journalists who often
conduct their own criminal enquiries challenging the judicial outcome of
cases and endangering the very foundations of criminal justice, such as the
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200012) 9:4 Copyright © 2000
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 9(4), 515–538; 014954
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presumption of innocence, the rules of evidence and other safeguards pro-
tecting defendants.
This critique of the media is grounded in genuine concerns about the state
of justice in a world that is becoming increasingly ‘mediatized’ and I do not
want to dispute that there are some serious issues at stake. However, what I
perceive as particularly problematic is that these concerns about excessive
media attention are often based on a vision of law as a system that is intrin-
sically independent, closed and endowed with a specific rationality that is to
be kept strictly separate from the populist and emotional responses rep-
resented by the media. For example, Bourdieu (1998: 56–7) argues that the
interference of the media, and television in particular
calls into question everything that has been acquired and guaranteed by the
autonomy of a juridical world able to set its model of rationality against intu-
itive senses of justice and juridical common sense, both of which often give in
to appearances or emotion.
Garapon (1996, 1997) contrasts the ‘jurisdiction of the emotions’ that domi-
nates the media with the ‘jurisdiction of the law’ and observes that judges
come under increasing pressure to succumb to popular sentiments. In this
article, I take issue with this model that pits law against emotions because it
suggests that law can be and should be divorced from other forms of human
judgement.
I will make this point mainly by focusing on an analysis of newspaper
articles that appeared in the press following the recent case of St George’s
Healthcare NHS Trust v S; R v Collins and others, ex parte S [1998], in which
a woman, whom we only know as S, successfully appealed against a court-
ordered caesarean section that she underwent after refusing to consent to life-
saving treatment (both for herself and the foetus) during her pregnancy two
years before. As my analysis will show, both in the newspaper articles and in
the judgement of the Court of Appeal, the impression was given that securing
a court order against S was an understandable, spontaneous reaction of doctors
and the social worker when they were confronted with S’s refusal, while there
was clearly less sympathy for S’s claim that her basic legal rights, such as her
right to autonomy and bodily integrity, had been infringed. The reaction of
the respondents was described as natural, authentic and even, to a certain
extent, noble and altruistic, while the applicant’s behaviour was represented as
bizarre, unusual and selfish. This seems to suggest that possible emotional
investments in this type of case are irreconcilable with the law and even that
basic legal safeguards are out of step with an intuitive form of judgement.
My argument is that operating a strict distinction between an emotional
response and a legal response is not particularly helpful in clarifying the
problem of enforced caesareans. Instead, I believe that it is more important to
undermine the idea that the only possible spontaneous reaction when doctors
are confronted with a pregnant woman refusing urgent treatment is to have
recourse to coercion. The legal and the emotional do not always form an
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