| Sumario: | The article proposes a reflection on the relations between bioethics, biopolitics, and the medicalization of social life, starting from the thesis that bioethics lacking biopolitical awareness remains naïve, while a biopolitics lacking ethical reflection becomes cynical. On the basis of Foucault's definitions of biopolitics (1976, 1997) and Illich's critique of social and cultural iatrogenesis (1976), the study distinguishes between the anatomopolitics of the body and the biopolitics of the population, and constructs a triple analytical grid -- sociological, bioethical, and biopolitical -- for contemporary phenomena of medicalization. To this grid is added Aurel Codoban's model of the body as a surface of communication (2011), read here within the horizon of an ontology of the sacred and of the communicational construction of reality: medicalization does not leave the body "neutral", but rather shifts its regime of signification, from the sacred toward the statistical and the communicational. The argument is tested through a case study devoted to the medicalization of maternity and to caesarean birth, in which both the bioethical--biopolitical tension and the ideological capture of the maternal body by pseudo-scientific "great replacement" narratives are analysed -- narratives whose quasi-religious structure is critically examined. The conclusion contends that a physician trained solely in bioethics, without an understanding of the power relations traversing the medical act, risks becoming a technical executant, while a physician trained solely in biopolitical terms, without bioethical principles, risks confusing public health with social control.
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