Of sonograms and baby prams: Prenatal diagnosis, pregnancy, and consumption

Feminist Studies

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 391-418

  Taylor, Janelle S ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0039029197     PISSN: 00463663     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3178541     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Ultrasound is a technology that employs high-frequency sound-waves to create visual images of internal bodily structures. Although used in many different branches of medicine, it has been particularly important in the field of obstetrics, where it is used to visualize the ovaries, cervix, fetus, placenta, umbilical cord, and so forth. AFP blood screening tests for levels of a particular hormone (alpha fetoprotein) in maternal blood; abnormal levels may indicate that the fetus suffers neural tube defects (such as spina bifida or anencephaly) or Down's syndrome. Amniocentesis is a procedure in which a needle is inserted through a pregnant woman's abdomen to extract a small amount of the fluid contained in the amniotic sac surrounding the fetus; this fluid is then analyzed for the possible presence of a (steadily increasing) number of chromosomal and genetic disorders.
2. Emily Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 63.
3. Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
4. The sonographer takes certain anatomical measurements of the fetus, such as the diameter of the head (biparietal diameter), and the "crown-rump length," and compares these to standard charts to obtain an estimate of the "gestational age" of the fetus. These always have a margin of error expressed as a function of time ("plus or minus so-and-so many weeks") which increases as pregnancy proceeds.
5. Barbara Katz Rothman, Re-creating Motherhood: Ideology and Technology in a Patriarchal Society (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 21.
6. Steven G. Gabbe, "Routine Versus Indicated Scans," in Diagnostic Ultrasound Applied to Obstetrics and Gynecology, ed. Rudy E. Sabbagha (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1994), 72.
7. For discussion of dilemmas surrounding selective abortion, see especially Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis (New York: Routledge, 1999).
8. Rothman, 19.
9. Ibid., 21.
10. Martin, The Woman in the Body, 145.
11. Ibid., 143.
12. Carol A. Stabile, Feminism and the Technological Fix (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994), 94.
13. Janelle Taylor, "The Public Fetus and the Family Car: From Abortion Politics to a Volvo Advertisement," Public Culture 4 (spring 1992): 69-87.
14. I borrow this phrasing from Cynthia Cockburn and Susan Ormrod's study of the "microwave world," Gender and Technology in the Making (London, U.K.: Sage, 1993): 19.
15. For a more detailed discussion, please see my "Image of Contradiction: Obstetrical Ultrasound in American Culture," in Reoproducing Reproduction: Kinship, Power, and Technological Innovation, ed. Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragoné (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
16. I would not expect this argument to apply in any straightforward way to all contexts where obstetrical ultrasound is used. In particular, the notion that knowledge of fetal sex is important primarily as an aspect of "consumption" of pregnancy is quite culturally peculiar; such information is very differently weighted where women are under pressure to bear male children, and the use of ultrasound for sex-selection is a real concern especially in India and China. Ironically, the view that things such as sex determination are harmless and generally enjoyable "extras" (which, as we shall see, is enshrined within the cultural form of the ultrasound examination in this country) opens a space for this technology to be used for sex selection here as well. Chris C. Fair, in an unpublished manuscript, discusses the case of Dr. John D. Stephens, who has patented a method for determining fetal sex via ultrasound in the first weeks of pregnancy (U.S. Patent #4,986,274) and operates clinics in several U.S. cities that advertise ultrasound for sex determination in Punjabi language newspapers, a practice protested by local Punjabi women's organizations.
17. Daniel Thomas Cook, "The Mother as Consumer: Insights from the Children's Wear Industry, 1917-1929," The Sociological Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1995): 519. See also his book, The Commodification of Childhood: Personhood, the Children's Wear Industry, and the Moral Dimensions of Consumption, 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
18. Daniel Thomas Cook, "The Mother as Consumer: Insights from the Children's Wear Industry, 1917-1929," The Sociological Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1995): 519. See also his book, The Commodification of Childhood: Personhood, the Children's Wear Industry, and the Moral Dimensions of Consumption, 1917-1967 (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).
19. Stork Site, accessed June 19, 1998, at http//www.storksite.com/index.html.
20. See also Linda Layne, "'I Remember the Day I Shopped for Your Layette': Consumer Goods, Fetuses, and Feminism in the Context of Pregnancy Loss," in Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions, ed. Lynn Morgan and Meredith Michaels (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
21. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
22. Jo B. Paoletti and Carol L. Kregloh, "The Children's Department," in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, ed. Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989), cited in Cook, "The Mother as Consumer."
23. Jo B. Paoletti and Carol L. Kregloh, "The Children's Department," in Men and Women: Dressing the Part, ed. Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1989), cited in Cook, "The Mother as Consumer."
24. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
25. Faye Ginsburg, Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
26. Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi Eisenberg Murkoff, and Sandee Eisenberg Hathaway, What to Eat When You're Expecting (New York: Workman Publishing, 1986), 16.
27. See also Susan Markens, C.H. Browner, and Nancy Press, "Feeding the Fetus: On Interrogating the Notion of Maternal-Fetal Conflict," Feminist Studies 23 (summer 1997): 351-72.
28. See discussion of ultrasound as "something surefire," in Margarete Sandelowski, With Child in Mind: Studies of the Personal Encounter with Infertility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 126.
29. Eisenberg, Murkoff, and Hathaway, 12.
30. Monica Casper and Vivian Christensen make this point forcefully in their recent analysis of the medical literature on prenatal exposure to toxins, "Our Environment, Ourselves: Hormone Disruptors and the Fragile Fetus" (Paper delivered at the "Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science," Tucson, 1997).
31. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, Introduction, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Ginsburg and Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2.
32. Robbie Davis-Floyd, Birth as an American Rite of Passage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
33. See also the discussion in Taylor, "Image of Contradiction."
34. Arjun Appadurai, "Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
35. Lisa Meryn Mitchell, Making Babies: Routine Ultrasound Imaging and the Cultural Construction of the Fetus in Montreal, Canada (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1993), 184.
36. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process," in The Social Life of Things, 64-91.
37. As I argue elsewhere, the obstetrical ultrasound examination is a site of considerable tension over the boundaries of "the medical," and sonographers' professional identity is invested in locating ultrasound squarely within the domain of the "medical"; see Taylor, "Image of Contradiction."
38. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. "consumer."
39. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 180.
40. Marshall Sahlins, "The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology," Current Anthropology 37, no. 3 (1996): 401.
41. Jean Comaroff's recent essay, "Consuming Passions: Child Abuse, Fetishism, and 'The New World Order,'" Culture 17, no. 1-2 (1997): 7-19, is exemplary and indexes much of this literature.
42. Daniel Miller, A Theory of Shopping (New York: Routledge, 1997).
43. Daniel Miller, "Consumption and Commodities," Annual Reviews of Anthropology 24 (1995): 144.
44. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 199.
45. Martin, The Egg and the Sperm.