Abstract
In debates over abortion, the foetus and the woman have been continually positioned as antagonists. Given the stakes involved in such debates about personal integrity, individual responsibility, life and death, it is no wonder that many radical feminist authors have concentrated on refocusing the attention on women and away from the disembodied foetus. Such writers have worked hard to decode and deconstruct the public foetus in our midst and have mobilized interpretative tools such as cultural criticism to contextualize the production and consumption of foetal images. Barbara Duden's book, The Public Foetus, is an important and interesting contribution to this effort, which is still taken up by authors writing in this field. Duden's strategy is to seek to remind us (and in particular those who are involved in reproductive medicine) that pregnancy is concentrated in the embedded pregnant woman rather than the disembodied ‘public foetus’ and she attempts to retrieve the embodied woman as the site of pregnancy through what Michaels has termed a ‘fetal disappearing act’. While this may create as many problems for women as it resolves, I would argue that, while the ‘public foetus’ continues to loom large in the politics of abortion and women's positions in relation to the new reproductive technologies remain contested, Duden's work remains important in the continuing debate about how women's reproductive freedom can be continually re-negotiated and re-established.
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Notes
Duden's essay starts with the religious backdrop to the abortion debate in Germany and at points throughout the essay she draws upon religious discourses that surround the issues of reproductive control. While I accept the power of religious discourses to effect a change in society, it does not seem to me that the influence of religion in the UK has the same hold as it does in Germany and the USA and so for this and other reasons, I have not discussed this aspect of Duden's essay in any depth.
A number of feminist writers in this area have discussed the objectification of woman through medical intervention in pregnancy and how this takes away from women's felt experience. See Taylor (1998) and Oakley (1987). However, Duden uses the term ‘felt experience’ in a very specific and historically grounded way.
There is a certain irony in the way in which ultrasound has come to be seen as a window on the body in that it is primarily a technology based upon sound waves rather than vision. It has been suggested that the reason the technology is set up in such a way as to translate sound waves into a visual images is the preference in modern culture for a visual image. See Franklin et al. (2000).
Throughout her book, Duden uses the term ‘unborn’ to denote the embryo or foetus embodied within the mother. She uses this to distance and contrast the pregnant woman with the public foetus.
For a different consideration of pregnancy as a tentative condition in relation to the issue of the reassurance about lack of abnormality provided by ultrasound imaging, see Janelle Taylor (1998).
For an account of the commodification of the modern foetus, see Janelle Taylor (1998).
Saetnan's study seemed to suggest that for those women who were going through their first pregnancy and had not yet experienced the baby move, the ultrasound did seem to carry more authority than other clinical tests and experienced pregnancy symptoms. It made the pregnancy seem more real to them (Saetnan et al., 2000: 339). However, for other women who had felt ‘quickening’, the sensations of their own bodies took precedence over the ultrasound images. Saetnan's conclusion was that the visual images did not push aside the signals that women felt from within their own bodies and that generally, the images functioned as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, the women's embodied experiences of pregnancy (Saetnan et al., 2000: 340). However, Saetnan did note that in order for women to make the translation from the images on the screen to their bodily sensations, they had to some degree to ‘subordinate themselves to medical authority’ in as far as most of the women relied on the midwife's interpretation of the images rather than what they themselves could see. Nevertheless, Saetnan concludes that most of the women were able to maintain, to some extent, an interpretation of the scan as an opportunity to see the baby even as they recognized that the medical role of the ultrasound was for diagnostic purposes (Saetnan et al., 2000: 341).
None of the women in the survey had received a negative diagnosis (in the sense that there were problems with the foetus) and Saetnan considers that if this had been the case, it may have been more difficult to resist a medical construction of the pregnancy (Saetnan et al., 2000: 351)
Petchesky (1987) mentions a different magazine a few years earlier in her article. Karen Newman (1996) suggests that foetal images have been around far longer but makes reference to medical textbooks and I think she misses the point in that many of the drawings represent homunculi rather than true foetal images. Further, medical diagrams and representations were not widely available for utilization in cultural and social discourse in the sense that images of the foetus were in the twentieth century. Duden makes clear in her article that she is distinguishing between diagrammatic representation and facsimile.
That is assuming that the woman is allowed to enter into a dialogue with the medical expert. Taylor (1998) has noted that since gynaecologists have been able to determine due dates from ultrasound images, in many instances woman are no longer even asked for the date of their last period as it is assumed that the information gleaned from the image will be more truthful and accurate than the woman's own testimony.
The reason that I have inserted hopefully here is that a number of writers including Duden (1993a) and Taylor (1998) have noted that the claim that abnormalities can be discovered earlier through the use of ultrasound technology does not seem to be borne out in practice. There have been many mistakes made in diagnosis and consequently the medical use of the ultrasound in antenatal care for this purpose has come under some scrutiny.
The statistics used by Duden (1993a) suggested that a high percentage of women were exposed to ultrasound, but by no means all. Janelle Taylor's more recent article (1998) would seem to suggest that almost all women now experience at least one ultrasound during pregnancy and that if they do not for some reason, they are now inclined to demand one.
An extreme example of foetal rights displacing those of its mother can be seen in a number of disturbing cases of women being kept on life support machines, in some case against their express wishes until the child can be born by caesarean. For an account of the legal position of the foetus and embryo see Alison Young (1993), Petchesky (1987) and Julie Wallbank (1999, 2000).
Arguably Duden's analysis about the privacy of the exterior of the pregnant female body does not stand up to close scrutiny as many feminists would argue that the female body is hugely public and commodified in modern society. I discuss this issue later in the paper.
Ultrasound technology clearly fits within the Foucauldian model of disciplinary power. It involves sophisticated techniques of surveillance and examination that make foetuses visible in ways that facilitate the creation of new objects and subjects of medical as well as legal and state intervention. However, authors such as Farquar (2000) and Sawicki (1991) remind us that such power is diffuse, multifaceted and can operate both positively and negatively, enabling as well as controlling. As such, Jawicki's interpretation of a Foucauldian understanding of power as ‘a myriad of shifting relations’ does not undermine Duden's analysis; rather it situates her appeal to a more holistic, maternal experience of pregnancy as only one of several strategies than can be employed to resist the medicalization of pregnancy and women's bodies.
These quotes are taken from a number of articles in the Guardian newspaper (for example Tues, 28 December 1999 and 4 April 1999. There was also a more recent article in 2001 that described how a group of artists have written graffiti over advertisements in such as way as to totally change the meaning of the advertisement from that intended. I would argue that in the current visual society, we are constantly engaging with and re-negotiating images in this way, putting them within our own contexts.
In this suggestion, Duden echoes concerns raised by FINRRAGE (Feminist International Network of Resistance to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering). This group argued in opposition to earlier liberal views of reproductive technologies, such as that of Shulamith Firestone who advocated their use to ‘free women from the tyranny of reproduction’ (1970). The group of radical feminists who formed this association in 1984 saw motherhood as the foundation of women's identity and saw reproductive technologies as an extension of patriarchal control and the exploitation of women's’ bodies (see Corea, 1985). They believed that the new reproductive technologies offered a powerful means of social control because they would become standard practice, as indeed the ultrasound examination is today. FINRRAGE saw reproductive technologies as linked to genetic engineering; for them, the female body was being expropriated as a ‘living laboratory’ (Mahjouri, 2004). To some extent, their arguments were prescient in that techniques such as IVF now provide researchers with the embryo material on which to do stem cell research. However, they underestimated the extent to which women's demands for the new technologies would be crucial in fostering their development (Wajcman, 2004).
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Acknowledgements
The following people have given valuable help in the research and revision of this paper: Bela Chatterjee, Hazel Biggs and the anonymous referees.
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Firth, G. re-negotiating reproductive technologies: the ‘public foetus’ revisited. Fem Rev 92, 54–71 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.4