Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions PDF
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Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions Edited by Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith W Michaels PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia Copyright © 1999 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fetal subjects, feminist positions / edited by Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith W. Michaels, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8122-3496-0 (cl. alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8122-1689-X (paper) 1. Feminist theory. 2. Fetus. 3. Fetus — Imaging. 4. Women's rights. 5. Human reproduction — Moral and ethical aspects. 6. Abortion — Moral and ethical aspects. I. Morgan, Lynn Marie. II. Michaels, Meredith W. HQ1190.F5 1999 305.42Ό1 —dc21 99-12261 CIP Contents Introduction: The Fetal Imperative 1 Meredith W. Michaels and Lynn M. Morgan Part I. Conceiving the Fetus: History and Overview 11 1. The Fetus on the "Farther Shore": Toward a History of the Unborn 13 Barbara Duden 2. The Emergence of the Fetus 26 Kathryn Pyne Addelson 3. Materializing the Fetal Body, Or, What Are Those Corpses Doing in Biology's Basement? 43 Lynn M. Morgan 4. Dead Embryos: Feminism in Suspension 61 Sarah Franklin 5. Fathers, Mothers, and Fetal Harm: Rethinking Gender Difference and Reproductive Responsibility 83 Cynthia R. Daniels Part II. Manipulating the Fetal Image 99 6. Operation to the Rescue: Feminist Encounters with Fetal Surgery 101 Monica J. Casper 7. Fetal Galaxies: Some Questions About What We See 113 Meredith W. Michaels vi Contents 8. The Traffic in Fetuses 133 Carol Α. Stabile 9. Minority Unborn 159 Carol Mason 10. Irish Trans/national Politics and Locating Fetuses 175 Laury Oaks Part III. Of Women and Fetuses 199 11. "Womb with a View": Script and Stills 201 Sherry Millner 12. The Fetal Monster 236 Ernest Larsen 13. "I Remember the Day I Shopped for Your Layette": Consumer Goods, Fetuses, and Feminism in the Context of Pregnancy Loss 251 Linda L. Layne 14. Fetal Reflections: Confessions of Two Feminist Anthropologists as Mutual Informants 279 Faye Ginsburg and Hayna Rapp Epilogue: Reflections on Abortion Politics and the Practices Called Person 296 Valerie Hartouni Bibliography 305 List of Contributors 331 Acknowledgments 333 Index 335 Introduction: The Fetal Imperative Meredith W Michaels and Lynn M. Morgan June 1997. The checkout line in the supermarket in Amherst, Massa- chusetts. Two young women are comparing snapshots. "He's growing up so fast," one says to the other. "I know. It's amazing how fast they grow at this age. Emma is already over four inches," says the other. "Giving our embryos to another infertile couple would be like giving our children up for adoption." — Melissa Moore Bodin, Newsweek, 28 July 1997 In January 1997 two bombs went off at a suburban Atlanta abortion clinic. The first bomb broke windows and scattered debris. . . . An hour later, a nail-packed bomb exploded 100 feet away. . . . The second de- vice was a so-called bubba bomb, the type of crude, black-powder device most commonly made by right-wing radicals. — FirstSearch Index Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, grounded women's right to abortion on the concept of constitutional pri- vacy, a pastiche of constitutional guarantees designed to protect individuals from state intrusion into private decisions. Ironically, the invocation of pri- vacy on the part of the Court has been accompanied by a burgeoning public fascination with fetuses, in part a result of effective anti-abortion propa- ganda, and in part a result of developments in medicine and technology that enable us both to visualize the fetus and to intervene "on its behalf." While feminists have begun to take note of the proliferation of fetuses in various written and visual forms (for example, obstetric and pediatric medi- cal journals, ultrasonic imaging, advertising, Hollywood movies, and so on), few have openly addressed the political and analytic problems that the emer- gence of fetal subjects poses for feminism. Feminist reluctance to engage in reflexive discussion of fetuses has been a 2 Meredith W. Michaels and Lynn M. Morgan prudential response to the politics of abortion. To talk about fetuses has been thought to cede to the pro-life movement its major premise, and so to foreclose the feminist insistence on reproductive freedom for women. Given the antagonisms that continue to erode whatever small ground we have gained in the struggle for reproductive control, it is understandable that feminist scholars and activists have tended to work around rather than through the fetus. Little in our political milieu suggests that feminism has successfully pervaded the landscape of political decision-making. Indeed, the recent surge of interest in punishing single welfare mothers for their callous wantonness, while not unprecedented in U.S. history, has taken the form of "protecting" not only children but fetuses from their mothers. A pregnant woman drinking in a bar is arrested for child abuse on the grounds that she is providing a minor child with alcoholic beverages. A pregnant woman who runs a red light and so causes a crash that results in her miscarriage is accused of manslaughter by her ex-boyfriend. A physician attempts to attain a court order to perform surgery on a fetus against the wishes of the pregnant woman. In much of the public arena, mothers are the enemies of the nation's children and proto-children. To recuperate the fetus in feminist terms necessarily forces us into dan- gerous territory. Yet to the extent that feminists avoid "fetal subjects," we risk leaving the field entirely in antagonist hands and unwittingly contribute to the persistent and insidious backlash against women's procreative integ- rity. Fetuses are no longer simply pawns in the hands of anti-choice activists. Twenty-five years after Roe v. Wade, fetuses have spilled out from the borders of the bitter abortion debate and become a regular, almost unremarkable feature of the public landscape. They have come to occupy a significant place in the private imaginary of women who are or wish to be pregnant (see Layne 1997b; Rothman 1986; Sandelowski 1993), as well as in the public arena of contestation over women's and children's rights to health care, to food, and to shelter. This trend has shaped the way we think about fetuses, in profound, yet virtually imperceptible ways. In taking the fetus seriously, we are compelled to place our discussion in the context of the shifting and heterogeneous dimensions of reproductive practices and politics. On the one hand, the meanings attached to life before birth vary enormously from culture to culture (Morgan 1989; Conk- lin and Morgan 1996). On the other hand, transnational economic and cultural processes ensure the globalization of the fetal subject, albeit medi- ated by local struggles and debates (see Mitchell and Georges 1997; Ortiz 1997). Ideas about "fetal personhood" are exported through the outreach work of organizations like Human Life International; a Swedish photogra- pher's images of fetuses are seen on television in Ecuador and in Nigeria; the fate of unclaimed frozen embryos is debated on the front pages of British tabloids. The anomalies of the fetal terrain require an analysis sensi- tive to the ways in which fetuses are constructed across boundaries of cul- Introduction 3 ture and nationality, and how fetuses do or do not figure into reproductive rights debates in different parts of the world. Nonetheless, the enormous financial and political resources devoted to anti-abortion activity in the United States render it the context in which the social construction of fetuses is most apparent. Given that fetuses figure so prominently in the rhetoric that sustains acts of violence against abortion providers and against women who seek abortions, the stakes of acknowledg- ing the cultural capital of fetuses are indeed high. It is against the backdrop of this grim reality that we launch our effort to enable feminist dialogue about fetuses. The chapters in this book are a collective effort to acknowl- edge the moral significance increasingly attributed to fetuses while retain- ing a commitment to the reproductive integrity of women. Our overarching critical and political perspective can be illustrated by contrasting it with a recent effort to reconstruct feminist reproductive poli- tics by "admitting" that fetuses have moral value. In 1995, Naomi Wolf's essay "Our Bodies, Our Souls" appeared in the New Republic. The title itself—a 1990s transformation of "Our Bodies/Our Selves," the signature phrase of the women's health movement in the 1970s — suggests that we are in for a purification ritual. What does Wolf hope to signify by the shift from selves to souls? According to Wolf, the pro-choice movement has lost the moral high ground to the anti-abortion forces, first, by refusing to talk about "good and evil" and second, by refusing to face up to the "biological facts" of fetal life. The two are apparently related since, stripped of our sense of sin, it is easy for feminists to cling selfishly (soul-lessly) to outmoded ideas about human embryology. Wolf conveniently bifurcates the moral terrain by suggesting that there are still too many bad women who have abortions for reasons of mere convenience, contrasting them with "the good reasons that lead good people to abort" (Wolf 1995:35). It is time, she says, for femi- nists to confront the hypocrisy of our position, to grant that while the anti-abortion movement may have misused images of violent fetal death as political polemic, "the pictures are not polemical in themselves: they are biological facts. We know this" (Wolf 1995:29). Wolf articulates a position that embraces fetuses, good, evil, and, she assumes, a feminism attuned to the moral consequences of biological facts. Though it is sometimes neces- sary, abortion is evil, just like war. Wolf's construction of a born-again feminism is situated in a specific understanding of abortion politics according to which feminists have alien- ated the "center" by insisting on the centrality of women's reproductive autonomy, and the anti-abortion movement has claimed the "center" by promoting the self-evident sanctity of fetal life. Apparently, more people relate to fetuses than they do to women. Wolf's turn to the fetus, then, is strategic: as a feminist, she knows that the criminalization of abortion would mean death for women and for women's procreative integrity. Her kinder, gentler, more maternal feminism signals an effort to woo back those who
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