- Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
- What data did you collect?
- What is your initial impression of the data?
- How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
- What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
- What are your next steps?
Testing the Women, Testing the Fetus
My new argument (?): Family progress is a precursor to economic progress, a pillar of neoliberalism.
- Amniocentesis: amniotic fluid test
- “medical procedure[1] used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and fetal infections,[2] and also for sex determination, in which a small amount of amniotic fluid, which contains fetal tissues, is sampled from the amniotic sac surrounding a developing fetus, and then the fetal DNA is examined for genetic abnormalities.” (Wikipedia)
- 2ndtrimester
- Women may choose to continue or end the pregnancy should the fetus have a serious fetal diagnosis
- “… they are forced to judge the quality of their own fetuses, making concrete and embodied decisions about the standards for entry into the human community” (3): interesting phrasing
National and International Contexts
- “This has affected aspects of prenatal testing as overt as recommended age and cost efficiency, as covert as the directiveness or neutrality of the counseling that accompanies testing, including the issue of whether and how directly women are pressured to continue or end a pregnancy in which a diagnosis of serious fetal disability has been made” (32)
- The “this” is most Western developed countries except the US having national health policies and funding (32)
- Most EU countries, the recommended age for amniocentesis is “for pregnant women who would be 40 or older at the time of delivery” (32-33).
- “In the United States, 35 was quickly established as the recommended age for the test, and the “age barrier” has dropped into the lower thirties in a free market economy in health care” (33)
- America: “’value-free’ counseling process… The decision to have or reject the test, and to continue or end a pregnancy should a serious fetal disability be diagnosed are, in principle, sacrosanct… In England, by contrast, three-quarters of the obstetricians surveyed in one study replied that they required women to agree in principle to terminate an affected pregnancy before they perform an amniocentesis. In the Federal Republic of Germany and in Hungary, geneticists see no problem with directive counseling. While a woman may change her mind, the medical-administrative rationale behind such requirements assumes that any response to a “positive diagnosis” besides abortion is a waste of scarce national medical resources” (33)
- “broader demographic trends which have influenced the decline of fertility rates throughout the West… the extension of ‘childhood,’ including the high costs of education children, making them ‘luxury consumer goods’ for many sectors of the population; the rise of divorce rates and concomitant dependence of some groups of mothers and small children on government-provided welfare benefits increasingly under attack” (33-34)
Women’s Agency
- “For these women, carriers of serious, often life-threatening diseases, early abortion was a more acceptable solution than late abortion or no abortion at all; they therefore enrolled their bodies and their fetuses in the experimental search for prenatal diagnosis” (34)
- Because children with serious disabilities can potentially hurt a family financially/ those children would not be independent actors in the free market, in neoliberal terms
Eugenics and Geneticization
- “Third, the ‘individual choice’ model of reproduction as noneugenic requires some interrogation. Because ‘choice’ is market-driven in contemporary North American culture, it appears to be based on expanding possibilities. But at the same time, available options are shaped by complex forces that travel as the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, in this case the market in genetic research. When ‘everything’ from well-characterized single-chromosome conditions like Down Syndrome to polygenic syndromes like manic depressions or alcoholism to alleged syndromes like a propensity for antisocial behavior or obesity can be popularly attributed to genetics and prenatally diagnosed, we may soon be standing on a ‘slippery slope’ of a ‘eugenic boutique’. Whose individual choices will these be? More subtly, who will frame the values within which those individuals making reproductive choices come of age? That is, attributing safety to an individual-choice model foregrounds personal liberty while backgrounding the social matrix of a technoscientific marketplace to whose requisites individual choices are increasingly enrolled” (37-38)
- “… the age old dream of perfectibility permitted an expanding structure of sentiment in favor of what Robert Sinsheimer as early as 1969 called ‘a new eugenics.’ In his view, an emergent biomedical eugenics would be implemented on the individual level in favor of normalcy. This idea of ‘the right to normalcy’ as a new eugenics is ‘an ideological expansion of molecular biology into both popular culture and medicine.’ To advocate a ‘right to normalcy’ presumes that we know what that means. To characterize normalcy in the language of biomedical ‘rights’ is also to individualize it. It is this trust that ‘the normal’ can be well characterized and individually ‘selected,’ which lies at the heart of the new eugenics. This new eugenics will be individually choice-driven. ‘It entails the responsibility for arbitrating normality,’ in Keller’s terms.” (38)
- “… ‘geneticization’: The extreme reduction of al problematic differences to an individual and genetic basis… You are the product of your (genetic) lineage has made you, and problematic social differences can hardly be alleviated by social policy because our diseases, disabilities, distresses, and troublesome demeanors lie locked in our genes.” (39)
Social Movements
- “experience of having a ‘tentative pregnancy’ while anxiously awaiting the results of amniocentesis” (47)