Abstract
The purpose of this article is to examine the public status of the human body by analyzing legislative bills involving blood donation, organ donation, surrogacy, abortion and euthanasia. The body, as a sign of the relation of human beings to the social, cultural and physical environment surrounding them, encloses a set of representations of individual and collective life, composing a grammar that became a particular object of a specialized corpus within sociology. Discussions about the body statute can reveal the political dimension emerging from the encounter between different scientific conceptions and the conventional wisdom about the body in our society. This explanatory research, based on documental analysis, focused on the contents of legislative bills involving human body. The legislative corpus is available at the Brazilian Electronic Library of the Chamber of Deputies, and comprehends the period from 1946 to 2019. The article shows that it is necessary to analyze the boundaries of the body in relation to the notion of person and the various forms taken by this relation in different spheres of the Law.
Keywords:
human body; social aspects; Sociology; Law; Brazil