reproductive technology and the new fetal/maternal relation

SUSAN SQUIER

FETAL SUBJECTS AND MATERNAL OBJECTS:REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY AND THE NEW

FETAL/MATERNAL RELATION

ABSTRACT. This essay examines three tendencies nurtured in the practices ofreproductive technology - tendencies with profoundly disturbing implicationsfor us as individuals and as social beings. They are: 1) the increasingsubjectification of the fetus (that is, the increasing tendency to posit a fetalsubject), 2) the increasing objectification of the gestating woman, leading to herrepresentation as interchangeable object rather than unique subject, and 3) theincreasing tendency to conceive of the fetus and the mother as social, medical,and legal antagonists. Considering the construction of fetus, mother, and thefetal/maternal relation in earlier (Western) historical periods, a contemporarywork of literature, a government report, and the popular press, I argue that as thefetus is increasingly being understood as a subject, the mother is increasinglybeing reduced to an antagonist, an obstacle to fetal health, and an object. Theessay concludes by offering some tentative conclusions about the general processof fetal subjectification in the United States and Europe.

Key Words: fetus, fetal/maternal relationship, reproductive technology

In 1994, in Clearwater, Florida, nineteen year old Kawana MicheleAshley, who according to newspaper reports "claimed she didn'thave enough money for an abortion," shot herself in the stomach.Taken to the hospital, on March 27 she was delivered by emer-gency Caesarian section of a baby girl. "After a week, [the baby's]underdeveloped kidneys began to fail and her body filled withfluids. She died April 11." Ashley was charged with third degreemurder and manslaughter: newspapers reported allegations thatshe killed her "6-month-old-fetus" "by shooting herself in thewomb" (CDT, 1994, p. 10A, my ital.).

This incident is not explicitly connected to the medical practicesof artificial insemination (AID), in vitro fertilization, surrogacy,zona drilling, GIFT or gamete intrafallopian transfer, ZIFT orzygote intrafallopian transfer, or the range of other techniques for

Susan Squier, Ph.D., Brill Professor of English and Women's Studies, PennsylvaniaState University, University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21: 515-535,1996.© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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scientific intervention into reproduction once called "the newreproductive technologies," and more recently often referred to assimply RT. Rather, it was reported in the newspapers as thealleged homicide of a fetus - a representation to which I willreturn later. Yet in its journalistic representation, the case ofKawana Ashley embodies tendencies nurtured in the practices ofreproductive technology - tendencies with profoundly disturbingimplications for us as individuals and as social beings. To enumer-ate them briefly, they are: 1) the increasing subjectification of thefetus (that is, the increasing tendency to posit a fetal subject),2) the increasing objectification of the gestating woman, leading toher representation as interchangeable object rather than uniquesubject, and 3) the increasing tendency to conceive of the fetus andthe mother as social, medical, and legal antagonists.

In what follows, I want first to consider how these troublingtendencies in our construction of fetus, mother, and the fetal/maternal relation relate to practices that we now associate withreproductive technology, including visualization technologies.Then I will turn to historical and contemporary representations ofpregnancy to suggest some alternative models for conceiving ofthe fetus, and of what we have called (for want of a better phrase)the fetal/maternal relation. Basic to my argument is the urgentsense that as the new reproductive technologies increasinglyauthorize a notion of the fetal subject, there is a simultaneous de-authorization or effacement of the maternal subject. As the fetusbecomes a self, the mother increasingly is becoming somethingless than a self; she is being reduced to an antagonist, an obstacleto fetal health, an object. I will close with a consideration of thelimits to that fetal subject, as articulated implicitly by the NationalInstitutes of Health Final Report of the Human Embryo ResearchPanel, published in September 1994.

I. CONTEMPORARY CONSTRUCTIONS OF FETUS AND MOTHER

A conceptual problem is embodied in the very notion of the ges-tating subject as the "mother." The two terms in the fetal/mater-nal dyad are not symmetrical. "Embryo" and "fetus" capture thenature of the process engaged in by the changing not-yet-subjectsin utero precisely without subjectifying them. The "embryo" is thatwhich exists between conception and eight weeks of life; the fetus




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that which exists between eight weeks and birth (NIH, 1994,p. 103). In contrast, the term "maternal" carries with it a rich set ofimplications and assumptions about maternal subjectivity,enfolded in the discourses of psychoanalysis, sociology, history,religion, art and literature. Unlike the terms embryo and fetus, theterm mother does not accurately describe the experience of theother partner in the "fetal/maternal" dyad, because it looks pastthe process of development to its culmination. "Mother" impliessuccessfully completed gestation-and-birth. The gestating womanundergoes an evolving process of subjectification parallel to theprocess of biological fetal development. She too develops, from awoman who may be pregnant, to a woman who is pregnant, to awoman who is carrying an embryo, to (after quickening) a womanwho is carrying a fetus. Yet when she is constructed as "maternal,"the label leaps over the in-between state she experiences while thefetus gestates, to grant her a subjectivity in advance of her condi-tion (as any nervous first-time mother-to-be will attest). Nor canwe apply the term "gestational mother" to specify the womanwho is pregnant; it telescopes the process of gestation, capping itprematurely with a still-only-to-be-anticipated birth. In short,while we now have a great range of increasingly precise terms forthe products of conception, ranging from zygote to pre-embryo, toembryo, to fetus, we have no customary term that captures the in-between subject that is the gestating woman. There is no quick,specific term for her complex, liminal subject position.

It is tempting to explain the asymmetry in these terms as aresult of the increasing use of visualization technologies withinreproductive technology. Undoubtedly, the different stages ofembryonic/fetal life are increasingly mediated by - and thus con-structed by - ultrasound and other fetal visualization technolo-gies, as was first demonstrated by Rosalind Petchesky's ground-breaking study of the power of fetal images (1987, pp. 57-80).1 Theproliferation of ultrasound "snapshots" of the intrauterine fetus inbaby albums attests to the increasing role of medical and techno-logical mediation in our mental conception of the fetus. And whilethis has received less emphasis or analysis, it is also arguable thatthe increasing gynecological and obstetrical uses of visualizationtechnologies have catalyzed a similar shift in our conception of themother, perhaps including an increasing sense of her permeability.Routine as well as diagnostic ultrasound shapes the subjectivity ofthe gestating mother along with the visualization of the changing




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fetus, making the pregnancy seem "more real" and thus mother-hood more immanent. As Barbara Duden observes in her study ofcontemporary representations of pregnant women:

Seeing a sonogram of their own belly is a normal experience for many pregnantwomen. And the more intensive the prenatal care provided, the greater the prob-ability that women are affected in their own bodies by the image they havelearned to see on the screen. Ultrasound imaging has come to play a symbolicallypredominant role in prenatal care (1993, p. 75).

Yet if both fetus and mother-to-be are equally mediated by thepowerful visualization technologies used in contemporary repro-ductive medicine, how do we explain the fact that in our turbulentnew cultural imaginary we increasingly give more concrete socialspace and more subjectivity to the fetus than to the gestatingwoman?

II. THE FETUS AND MOTHER IN HISTORY

One way of grasping the decreasing subject position available tothe gestating woman of today is to consider how pregnancy hasbeen represented and understood in earlier historical periods.Studying the medical case records of Dr. Johannes Storch in eigh-teenth century Germany, Barbara Duden has found that in thatearlier era, a pregnant woman's experience had a central deter-mining effect on how pregnancy was conceptualized. In Storch'sera a woman's testimony that quickening had occurred estab-lished the existence of the pregnancy. However, that testimonymore definitively constructed the woman as a mother-to-be than itshaped the contents of her belly as unquestionably a fetus, ratherthan a tumor, a growth, "wind," or any of a range of other possi-bilities. "Greater certainty came after the fourth month, when thefruit quickened in the womb... [but] the true thing hidden behinda big belly came to light only with the birth. Prior to that therewere no certain prognoses" (Duden, 1991, p. 160). Moreover, itwas the woman's testimony and not the doctor's measurements orpalpations that determined the pregnancy's anticipated durationand outcome.2 "Children were born from women; the womb hadnot yet become part of a reproductive apparatus" (Duden, 1991,p. 28). Clearly, pregnancy was a far more ambiguous process prior




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to the nineteenth century than than it is today, and Duden's worksuggests that the socio-medical model for the fetal/maternal rela-tion privileged the experience and testimony of the pregnantwoman as a crucial guide through its complex territory.

The contrast between the pre-nineteenth century understandingof pregnancy and our contemporary Western view reveals howthe once pivotal experience of quickening has been marginalizedand occluded, and with it, the central role of women's experience.Whereas once the interior space of the woman was unavailable tothe scientific gaze, and pregnancy was marked by the woman'stestimony that she had felt the fetus move, now the woman's ownexperience of internal fetal movements is relegated to theunvoiced and unwarranted realm of private experience, while theinterior space of the woman is available for all to see as part of thetechnologized state that Anne Balsamo has called "the publicpregnancy." As Barbara Duden has observed:

I understand the demise in the social status of quickening as an event that bringsan important paradox to the surface: in the course of the nineteenth century,female innards and interiority become medically, administratively, and judiciallypublic while, at the same time, the female exterior is privatized ideologically andculturally... On the one hand, the newly discovered "naturalness" of domesticityand motherhood... place women in the "private realm" in law, education, andethics. But at the same time, science discovers and professionals control andmediate her womb as a public space (1993, p. 95).

One way of understanding the meaning of this shift from anemphasis on maternal testimony to a reliance on medical imagingand measurement is as a battle over representation. As JonathanGoldberg has demonstrated, post-Enlightenment moral cultureincreasingly shaped the notion of rights to the minimalist viewwhich emphasizes equal opportunity and equal treatment overequality of result. In this view, based on the utilitarian calculus,"The rights of each becomes a matter of the power of and over themeans of representation" (Goldberg, 1993, p. 20). Goldberg isspeaking specifically about the role of representation in the pro-duction of racist culture, a concern which is relevant to the posi-tion of Kawana Ashley as I will discuss later in this essay, but formy purposes now his observation is particularly illuminating withrespect to the increasing fetal/maternal disjunction, and the con-sequent construction of fetus and gestating mother as social, legal




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and medical antagonists. While the constant improvements infetal monitoring ensure the production of ever more accurate anddetailed fetal representations (and increasing privileging of suchrepresentations given medicine's investment - both monetary andpsychic - in their continuous production), ever since Freud asked"What does woman want?" the medical community has had noto-rious difficulty ascertaining and accurately representing thesubject position, desires, needs, and capacities of woman - andthat includes the gestating woman.

III. LITERARY FIGURATIONS OF FETAL/MATERNAL RELATIONS

Representation always has an excess, however. Even whilefiguring the increasingly prominent fetal subject, representationmay also create a space enabling the reemergence of maternal sub-jectivity. An audaciously bitter comic novel published in theUnited States in autumn of 1994, at roughly the same time as theKawana Ashley case with which this essay began, can suggestsome alternative models for the fetal /maternal relation. PascalBruckner's The Divine Child explores the philosophical and socialimplications of the battle between fetus and mother over thepower of, and access to the means of, representation. By the veryapocalyptic excesses in which it images the new fetal subject,Bruckner's novel gradually enforces a reaffirmation of the subjectposition of the mother, through a powerful shift in readeridentifications that is itself a critique of our contemporary mode ofconceptualizing gestation and birth.

Bruckner's novel has a darkly comic force reminiscent ofElizabeth Jolley's The Sugar Mother (1989) and Katherine Dunn's1988 Geek Love; like those works, The Divine Child figures charactersboth obsessed and repulsed by the monstrous shapes of humansexual and reproductive practices. Madeleine Barthelemey, a youngwoman nauseated in her childhood by all forms of physical desire,marries Oswald Kremer, an elderly accountant whose obsessive-compulsive monitoring of physicality promises her relief from thefemale sensuality, indeed the abjection, she so fears. Like Edwin inJolley's The Sugar Mother, who records all of his own physicalchanges in his "book of the body," Kremer's appeal for Madeleinelies in his ability to account for, even to compass, her body with theprecise taxonomies of medicine:




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He was truly possessed with a mathematical itch, and in just a couple of weeksafter his wedding he had already found his wife's equation: he was able to givethe weight of her spleen, her kidneys, her liver, her bowels, and to gauge heraverage heartbeat over a twenty-four-hour period, and he also knew everythingdown to the circumference of her every last beauty spot and the diameter of herevery last hair (Bruckner, 1994, p. 5).

As befits her interest in control, Madeleine would have preferred"being inseminated by a great savant - say, a Nobel Prize winner,an elite mind" (p. 5). However, a quasi-comic eruption of resis-tance to reproductive technology renders that impossible:

the sale of Nobel semen had been outlawed after the demise of a laureate innuclear physics had provoked painful squabbles. On his hospital deathbed, thisIrishman was stormed by fanatics trying to extort the final precious drops of hismother liquor. Surprised by a nurse, they cut the dying man's genitals off... Eversince, all the Nobel laureates, whatever their discipline, have sported thickchastity belts, which they never remove, not even at night (pp. 6-7).

Instead, Madeleine finds herself pregnant by her husband, andshe is forced to play the genetic lottery, rather than selecting her"progeniture like an item in a department store" (p. 7). While shethus escapes the commodification of gametes and fetuses thatplays so large a part in reproductive technology, she signs on for alater form of commodification when she decides to subject thefetus to a rigorous course of prenatal education. With the assis-tance of Dr. Fontane her obstetrician, she feeds a barrage of infor-mation into her womb through a range of miniature speakersinserted in every available maternal orifice. The deluge of infor-mation finally catalyzes a response: one morning, when Madeleineis feeling "disheartened and miserable about birthing a garden-variety larva," she hears "two voices twanging and begging:More, more'" (p. 17)! A sonogram confirms that she is carryingtwins who - in a detail that attests to the power of ultrasound andDther visualization technologies to construct the fetal subject - arenamed Louis and Celene while still in utero.

Madeleine welcomes the news that she is carrying twins forunambiguously materialist opportunistic reasons: "a twosomewould double the opportunities. In case one baby left the track,:he other would grab the torch" (p. 18). And that is precisely whatlappens: while both fetuses are subjected to the same intense dose:>f prenatal education, it affects them dramatically differently. The




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female twin is vanquished; the male prevails. At the birth of littleCelene, a would-be scientist already in the womb, the appalledaudience of physicians, publicists, and the public watches herdraw her first breath only to forget every last bit of her prenataleducation:

instead of the bewitching creature who was going to curtsy and then squeal,"Where is the research program on the human genome?" they discovered adreadful, mucus-covered mite with a wrinkled face. Terrified by the noise andthe light, it could only stammer: "Arrheu, Arrheu..." (p. 46).

The remaining fetus, Louis, has also been rendered preternaturallyintelligent by his crash course in utero. Yet having seen what birthdid to his twin sister Celene, Louis is too intelligent to acquiesce inbeing thrown out of the maternal haven into the dangerous world.Instead, he refuses to be born; staying in his cozy uterine controlroom, he aspires to control the world, relying on the same visual-ization technology that earlier was used to monitor him in utero:

His garret of mucus now resembled the instrument panel in a jet cockpit: severalmonitors, a video screen, earphones, dozens of flashing signal lights, a computerterminal, an ultrasophisticated radiophone, and a fax machine situated him at thecenter of a gigantic communications network, an immense nervous system thatlinked him to the four corners of the world (pp. 100-101).

Bruckner's novel figures a drastic shift: from the notion of theembryo as object of scientific control to the new notion of embryo-as-controlling-subject. In so doing, it revises the maternal-fetalrelation. It is neither one of enabling mother to mysterious fetus(as it was in Johannes Storch's day), nor oppressive mother tofetus in need of protection (as in the heyday of modernist medicalmonitoring). Now it figures a new antagonism, whose reverseddirection suggests some of the postmodern possibilities fosteredby a reorientation of the modern regime of medical monitoring.Visual power no longer serves as a means of control over the fetus;now it acts as a means of control by the fetus, not only over thegestating woman but over the world beyond her womb. And it isthe fetus who has the best view of all, both of the world outsideand of the inside of his mother's body:

A small gadget, a miracle of microscopic engineering that some physicians lent toLouis, was to confirm him in his role of shepherd of the maternal flock. This




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doohickey consisted of a pair of infrared binoculars that combined the functionsof a telescope, a magnifying glass, and a telephone: not only could you see thingsnear or far, but also, thanks to an incorporated mike, you could speak to what-ever the eyes picked up. With the help of these glasses not a particle of hismother's body would escape the tot; he could view the very core of any object,down to the nucleus of every cell (Bruckner, 1994, p. 131).

The fact that this scopic gadget was lent to Louis by some physi-cians makes concrete medicine's reliance on visualization tech-nologies as part of the new technologized reproduction. Standardmedical practice increasingly subjects the pregnant woman's body,and her activities, to exhaustive, invasive scrutiny. We can recallthe '60s film, "Fantastic Voyage," in which a team of scientists ledimprobably enough by Raquel Welch journeyed into the blood-stream of a fellow scientist in order to cure him of some dangerousdisease. Bruckner's involutional twist on this familiar paradigmreverses the direction of power:

Louis would have much preferred being miniaturized himself, piloting a bathy-scaphe through Mom's veins, chugging through her tracheal arteries, toboggan-ing through her digestive tract... However, since science was unable to shrink ahuman being to the size of a microbe or bacterium... Louis had to contenthimself with having only his gaze penetrate the maternal apparatus (p. 131).

A shift in the site of privileged subjectivity has taken place, andBruckner's novel calls our attention to it powerfully. Now it is thefetus himself - rather than the physicians, miniaturized or not -who uses scopic power to penetrate the mother, colonizing herwith all of the complex technological apparatus hitherto used on"the products of conception." Woman's subjectivity has beenelided; instead, Bruckner gives us the embryonic or fetal subjectwhose rights exceed those of the already born, particularly ofwomen.

Bruckner's embryo /fetus also reverses the direction of scopicpower from the fetus as object of scientific observation, to thesociety beyond. The modernist control aspirations articulated bygeneticist Hermann Muller - "To gain adequate control over theworld of things of our own size... we must first seek knowledgeand control of the very small world" (1936, p. 22) - are thus literal-ized with comic force in Bruckner's postmodern parable, asLouis's scopic invasion of his mother's private spaces enables himto achieve nearly total dominance of the world beyond the womb.




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When "a group of Japanese scientists... offered him a holographicdevice that could project moving images onto the lining of thewomb," Louis's visual reach no longer exceeds his grasp. He hasfashioned a uterine heaven (Bruckner, 1994, p. 100). Little wonderthat Bruckner's embryo comes to think of himself as nearly divine,claiming: "I am living proof that the fetus is not man's initial state,but his total state, after which it is all downhill" (p. 79).Organizing his followers beyond the womb, he forms "the Churchof the Divine Child ("The child is divine because he hasn't beenborn")." Once the fetus achieves quasi-divine eminence, he orga-nizes an association: "Fetuses Against Birth, or FAB, and heurge[s] children to remain inside their moms until better days[come] along. Heeding his advice, a few pregnant women [have]themselves frozen with the stipulation that they shouldn't beawakened until the end of time" (p. 92). Ultimately, he commandshis followers: "If you can't regress to being embryos, then you'llhave to become babies again! Hundreds of men and womenpromptly obeyed this fiat" (p. 94).

Yet the Divine Child's doctrine of willed regression meets itslimits when Louis discovers that it applies to even his own fetalform. Finding to his horror that his body is gradually "fossilizing,returning to his embryonic state," he determines to take the worlddown with him, and announces an impending apocalypse:

The defeat of the old world [is] slated for... the exact date on which Louis, fiveyears earlier, had refused to be born, to lend himself to the human comedy. Ashudder went round the world: What if the Super-Microbe were telling thetruth? What if everything were to be resorbed through the magic of a vocable(P-192)?

Now indeed fetus and mother are antagonists, but the reader'ssympathies are all with the latter. Only the scheming of Madeleineand her obstetrician can defeat the embryo's devolutionary inten-tions. Together, they once again wire up "the still semibedriddengenetrix... with cables and loaded down with cameras scanningevery square inch of her belly," and subject Louis to the same tech-nological barrage of information, sight and sound that created him(Bruckner, 1994, p. 205). Overwhelmed by the cacophony, "theexhausted homunculus drop[s] into the maternal marsh to keepfrom hearing," sinking "into an interminable vortex" (p. 209).Dr. Fontane then delivers the coup de grace, subjecting the encysted




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fetus "to the type of high-frequency ultrasound normally used tocrumble gallstones and kidney stones. The mite explodefs] anddisperse [s] in a thousand fragments Madeleine was delivered"(p. 210).

In its fantasy of a willed regression to the isolation, power andcentrality of the fetus (a postmodern high-technology extension ofFreud's "his majesty, the baby"), Bruckner's novel throws intohigh relief several of the social implications of reproductive tech-nology. Most explicitly, in its closing pun, "Madeleine was deliv-ered," it articulates the interconnections between high-techgestation and growing maternal-fetal antagonism that I argue hascharacterized the modern reproductive regime. The increasingtendency to privilege the fetus, and to represent it as detachedfrom an objectified and de-privileged maternal surround, is theculmination of a trend in the fiction and science writing of the'teens, twenties and thirties toward increasing interest in, andexploration of, reproductive innovations such as extra-uterine ges-tation, tissue culture, and prenatal sex selection (among others).As I have explored elsewhere, this trend has been expressed mostpowerfully in the image of babies in bottles (Squier, 1994). As anicon of the test-tube baby, such an image embodies the desire forscientific control over embryological development that has fueledthe development of reproductive technology since the early yearsof the twentieth century.

Bruckner's novel represents a curious reversal of this image ofmedical science controlling the embryo/fetus, however, for TheDivine Child portrays a research embryo/fetus that inverts thecommon control relationship characterizing the images of babiesin bottles from their earliest appearances in the late nineteenthcentury to the extrauterine fetuses of our era. In those images ofbabies in bottles the notion of control characteristically flows inone direction: control is exerted by the scientific observer /experi-menter over the embryo being observed. In The Divine Child, wehave a new twist on the baby in the bottle, the visualized babywho by virtue of its being seen is separate from the mother.Bruckner's "baby" is - like those earlier images - also representedas a discrete entity. Yet this fetus is not extra-uterine; rather, itwon't leave the mother, for it refuses to be born. Moreover, inBruckner's version, it is not society (and medical science) whichcontrol the embryo, but rather the embryo which controls society.This shift in the vectors of control is articulated by Bruckner in a




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striking scene in which the "divine child" considers himself as asubject:

Allow me to tell you, dear human brethren, that I am the fruit of a unique muta-tion. Even in my original cell phase, I knew exactly where I was going. Can oneeven maintain that I was "conceived" in the true sense of the term? I doubt it.Had I not always existed?... I am living proof that the fetus is not man's initialstate, but his total state, after which it is all downhill... I am my dearest enigmato myself; I never tire of trying to solve myself. Why, I can affirm that I've come along way, I'm fine today - to quote dear old Hegel, 'Knowledge as the self-con-ceiving self - if you catch my drift. My peculiarity? I am only a brain, a giantintellectual apparatus" (p. 79).

There is a modernist cast to Louis Kremer's self-construction as"a brain, a giant intellectual apparatus": "the fetus is not man'sinitial state, but his total state, after which it is all downhill"(p. 79). Bruckner's image recalls the evolutionary eugenicism ofJ.D. Bernal and J.B.S. Haldane, both of whom imagined a techno-logically-assisted development of the human being from prosaicearth-bound embodiment to prosthetically enhanced, even extra-terrestrial, disembodiment (Bernal, 1929; Haldane, 1923).

Yet if the progressivist embrace of a technologically enabled ges-tation grants the fetus a unilateral trajectory from the originalmoment of conception - so that all of the possible alternative out-comes to that beginning moment are stripped away - it can onlydo so against a background of an earlier, alternative constructionof pregnancy as one among many possible outcomes. In JohannesStorch's era it was the woman's experience - her testimony of fetalquickening - that defined the event as a pregnancy, rather than theproduction of a monstrous growth, for example. Yet to imply thatone representation was replaced by another is misleading. As withmost cultural constructions, although one may prevail, its now-devalued partner remains, a shadow presence marking the bound-aries of what is deemed normal. Thus, these two very differentconstructions of pregnancy - the teleological/unitary, and themultiple/contingent - currently circulate in contemporary repre-sentations of embryological development, both in the context ofembryo research and of reproductive technology. I will close withone site in which they both appear and where they function toestablish the limits of the fetal subject, before returning - viaanother newspaper story on reproductive technology - to the caseof Kawana Ashley.




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IV. LIMITS OF THE FETAL SUBJECT

The Final Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel, pub-lished on September 27,1994, constructs the embryo as both a tele-ologically-determined unitary potential subject and as a contin-gent and multiple object of scientific research (NIH, 1994, p. xx).Pointing to the "special moral status of the embryo" as motivatingthe formation of this commission to assess public attitudes towardembryo research, the report distinguished between "embryosintended for and not intended for transfer" (NIH, 1994, p. 51).What emerges in the discussion is the view that the intention totransfer an embryo to a woman's uterus for gestation and birthratifies the embryo as normal and acceptable. For the NIH panel,embryos had distinct status based on whether they were [to be]transferred medically to the human uterus (and thus intended todevelop into a human fetus), or were not [to be] transferred (andthus not intended to develop into a human fetus). Embryos thatio not attain such ratification - in the report, this group includesparthenotes, chimeras that are the result of intra-species cross-breeding, clones - lose their teleological authority and becomeprey to the [otherwise denied] play of chance during gestation. In>hort, an embryo is understood to have the potential to become asubject if and only if it can be ratified as normal, acceptable, trans-ferable. The fact that the Human Embryo Research Panel focusedexclusively, and explicitly, on what it calls the "ex utero preim-plantation embryo" or "extracorporeal human embryos" obvi-3usly represents a further step in the polarization of the fetal/naternal dyad. If, as Barbara Duden has demonstrated, in Storch'sera that dyad was defined by maternal experience, and if in thenodern era of high-technology gynecology and reproductive tech-nology that dyad is defined by an antagonism mediated by law,religion and medical science, then the Embryo Research Panelnight be seen to inaugurate a new era, wherein the fetal/maternaliyad has vanished along with the mother, leaving behind only anembryo that may or may not be permitted to become a fetus.

In the NIH report, several different kinds of research wereieemed unacceptable for federal funding: the cloning of humanDreimplantation embryos; studies designed to transplant nucleinto an enucleated egg; research beyond the onset of closure of theleural tube; research involving the fertilization of fetal oocytes;Dreimplantation genetic diagnosis for sex-selection except for sex-




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linked genetic diseases; transfer of human-nonhuman and human-human chimeras with or without transfer; cross-species fertiliza-tion; attempted transfer of parthenogenetically activated humaneggs; attempted transfer of human embryos to nonhuman animalsfor gestation; and transfer of human embryos for extrauterine orabdominal pregnancy. The NIH document explains the decisionnot to fund such research methods on "scientific grounds," yet it isarguable that they are also declared off-limits because of the waysthey shift and challenge our notion of the human construction ofthe self. If we revisit the lengthy list above, we will see that the fol-lowing human definitional boundaries are challenged or putunder erasure: the notion of individuality of each human subject(pace the existence of twins, which is acceptable as a product ofchance); the notion of the brain as an intact organ not subject tohuman manipulation (except through non-invasive environmentalstimulation known as teaching, and parodied in Bruckner'snovel); the notion of a distinct boundary between humans andother species, and between humans and machines.

Two related procedures raise such clear problems that the NIHexplicitly draws on extra-scientific reasons for proscribing them:the formation of chimeras and interspecies uterine transfer. Of theformer, the NIH panel surveyed the creation of human-animal andhuman-human chimeras, and observed:

It is theoretically possible to make chimeras between human embryos and closelyrelated primates, such as chimpanzees but.. . the fetus would have cells derivedfrom both species in all tissues. It might be possible for the chimeric fetus to havelarge parts of the brain and/or gonads derived mostly from primate cells andother parts of the body derived mostly from human cells, a situation that would,from both a medical and ethical standpoint, be totally unacceptable (NIH, 1994,p. 43).

Although the panel specifies that "the fetus would have cellsderived from both species in all tissues," the continuing discus-sion points to just what is threatening about this human-animalchimera: the possibility of either a brain or of gonads that areprimate. While it is clear that there are strong scientific and socialreasons why the creation of such a chimera would be problematic,it is also clear, from the focus on the gonads and the brain, that theimage generates specifically devolutionary anxieties. Interspeciesuterine transfers raised anxieties more than half a century ago,when philosopher Anthony Ludovici speculated:




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it is probable, therefore, that in the early days of extra-corporeal gestation, thefertilized human ovum will be transferred to the uterus of a cow or an ass, andleft to mature as a parasite on the animal's tissues... And with this innovation,we shall probably suffer increased besotment, and intensified bovinity or asinin-ity, according to the nature of the quadruped chosen (1924, p. 92).

The NIH panel's reasons for prohibiting such research enumer-ated the possibility of immunological rejection, the importance of"maternal-fetal placental interactions," and the crucial "begin-nings of mother-child bonding and of human relationship."However, only the devolutionary anxieties of the early years ofthis century can explain the powerful phrase with which thepanel's assessment concludes: "The Panel finds it repugnant toexperiment with such relating between a human fetus and a non-human gestational mother" (NIH, 1994, p. 96).

An implicit embryonic subject is set forth in the NIH Panel'sreport: one ratified as normal and acceptable within the humancommunity, targeted for transfer to a woman's uterus, and thuspermitted to grow into a fetus, and to be born. Embryos not thusratified by science (specifically, by the NIH regulations), such asparthenotes, chimeras resulting from intra-species cross-breeding,and clones, are denied teleological authority and become prey tothe (otherwise denied) play of chance during gestation.

Hilary Rose sees the origins of this bifurcation of the embryonicdevelopmental trajectory in the agreement Lesley Brown - motherof the first IVF baby - was forced to sign by doctors RobertEdwards and Patrick Steptoe: "as a condition of her being treatedwith the new experimental techniques, that she would have anabortion if the foetus was abnormal" (Rose, 1994, p. 177). Nolonger does the unpredictability of conception produce a compen-satory concern for the experience of the pregnant woman, whosetestimony alone could account for what was happening in theinvisible interior (as in the case of Storch's Germany). Instead, theNIH report mirrors our dramatically different current situation.Now, visualization technologies and other forms of prenataltesting, from chorionic villus biopsy to amniocentesis, purveyknowledge that is still ambiguous, still less than certainty, but nowdeemed more reliable than the gestating woman's knowledge. Andwith the decreasing contingency of the gestational outcome, notonly the fetus but the gestating woman comes under medicalcontrol.




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Yet there is a crucial distinction here: the vagaries of pregnancythat may produce a deformed embryo are somehow beinggrouped in with the results of scientific experimentation that mayalso produce embryonic anomalies, and both of those so-called"abnormal'' pregnancies are being opposed to a new "normal"pregnancy, retrospectively defined not in terms of the set of expe-riences that led to birth, but rather in terms of its outcome. Asubtle shift has occurred that is worth highlighting. From concep-tualizing both gestation gone right and gestation gone awry asnatural (because both outcomes were found in nature), we havecome in our era to policing the outcome of gestation medically.Now, increasingly (and in the shadow presence of eugenics), weaccept only "successful gestation" - whether carried out by tech-nological intervention or not - as natural. A recent article in theNew York Times illustrates this shift in constructions of the natural.Reporting that medical authorities in Warsaw, Poland, have"ordered a private fertility clinic to stop in vitro fertilization treat-ments on the grounds that the doctors there were violatingPoland's anti-abortion law," the article quotes Polish Senator ZofiaKuratowska, a physician, as "describing in vitro fertilization as 'anormal method in civilized countries'" (Perlez, 1995, p. 6). In vitrofertilization is normal, while infertility is abnormal; the vagaries ofconception and gestation are replaced by the fantasy of controland normalization. IVF pregnancy is now the normal outcome of anatural parental - or perhaps I should say paternal - will to inter-vene technologically. The most anguished response to the news ofthe IVF clinic's closing, the article reported, "came from a manwho said 'How can they stop me having my own baby?'" (Perlez,1995, p. 6).

Between these two constructions of pregnancy - as a technologi-cally gratified outcome of a male desire for progeny, and as anadversarial relation between a subjectified fetus and an objectifiedmother (in the Kawana Ashley case) - is a distance traversedthrough the space of nation, the racialized body and the genderedbody, and through the time of capitalism, of gestation, of the legalprocess. The Polish man protesting the closure of the private fertil-ity clinic speaks in the discourse of liberal individualism, framingthe fetus as property to which he, like all civil subjects, has a right.(And, like civil societies of the past, such citizens are genderedmale.) The story also invokes the space of a newly capitalistPoland, where entrepreneurs from the former West Germany have




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brought the message of individual agency to a country oppressedby collectivity. "The Novum clinic was opened [in Warsaw] inMay by Katarzyna Koziol and Piotr Lewandowski, after theyreceived training at a leading German in vitro fertilization clinic inEssen" (Perlez, 1995, p. 6). Finally, it embodies the discourse ofscientific rationality, staunchly in opposition to religious funda-mentalism, when it quotes the views of Beata Skolimowski, whowanted "to try the clinic again for a second child," and who felt"very frustrated by the religious policy adopted by theGovernment" (Perlez, 1995, p. 6). In a Poland portrayed as boggeddown in collectivism, to close down an IVF clinic is to roll back thesigns of progress felt by Poland since 1989, back from scientificand civil rationality to the irrationality of the pre-Baconian reli-gious order. As the Times reports, "The action against the Novumclinic, a high-tech set of laboratories and treatment rooms in acountry with dilapidated state-run medical institutions, hascaused a furor among doctors, legislators and patients" (p. 6).

In contrast to the would-be consumers of in vitro fertilization innewly capitalist Poland who are given the space to express theirneeds and desires, Kawana Ashley - the young woman in Floridacharged with murdering "a 6 month fetus" - does not speak at all.Her attempted suicide is rendered invisible by the very languagein which it is reported. As the newspaper reports have it, sheshoots herself not in the stomach, but in the womb. Manifestly herbody is already colonized by a fetus with greater definitionalrights than she herself has, for it constitutes her injured body partas not a stomach, but a womb. Similarly, the social circumstancesthat may have led her to shoot herself - the poverty that makes anabortion too expensive in a state where access to abortion isseverely limited - are narrated conditionally, as an exoneratingclaim. Her experiences as a member of a racial minority in theAmerican South are also obscured, leaving their trace only in hername, and in her actions. Here again, the definitional power goesnot to the black citizen who has rights to equal medical care underthe law, nor to the female citizen who has a right to control herown body including the right to an abortion, but rather (in a legalcontext) to the rights of one subject - (here, the so-called murderedfetus) weighed against the exculpating claims of another (theaccused murderer).

Writing on the gene as cultural icon, Dorothy Nelkin andM. Susan Lindee have observed that "Genes appear far more




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newsworthy than social or economic circumstances as a source ofanti-social behavior," and they hypothesize that this interest ingenes "reflects a tendency to medicalize social problems" (1995,pp. 89, 91). While the preoccupation with medical rather thansocial issues clearly shapes the reporting of the Kawana Ashleycase, Nelkin and Lindee's analysis of the power of the gene as iconalso suggests that something more is going on than a journalist'spreference for flashy high-tech medicine over low-tech socialobservation. They argue that in American culture, DNA is increas-ingly conceptualized as "the point at which true identity (and self)can be determined" (Nelkin et al., 1995, p. 40). While there may,ironically, be a hopeful aspect to this resituation of identity not atthe level of race, but at the submolecular level (where even deter-mined eugenics projects will be unable to invoke racial agendas),for the case of Kawana Ashley this new move to the micro is prob-lematic.

A continuum exists, product of our increasing biomedicalinvestments in reproductive technology ranging from genomics,to embryo research, to in vitro fertilization and neonatalogy. Thiscontinuum links the hyperprivileged gene that "erases complexityand ambiguity," the normalized embryo that is the product of a tele-ologically-driven, output-focused reconceptualization of repro-duction, and the subjectified fetus represented so powerfully inBruckner's novel, thought to contain all the potential of humanlife. Just as the gene increasingly appeals as the most compellingarticulation of a stable personal subject, and the embryo increas-ingly captures the popular imagination as the site of progressivemedical/technical improvements to the human species, so too thefetus increasingly appeals as a stable subject not vulnerable to thesocial and political shifts of contemporary life, including theincreasing instability of the categories of race and sex/gender, andthe painful complexities of maternal experience. This continuumoperates powerfully to redefine the position of the gestatingwoman. Against the medically and culturally linked and valorizedappeal of the gene, the embryo, and the fetus, all mobilized andexploited in our new era of reproductive technology and geneticengineering, the subject position of the isolated pregnant woman -as of the mother to be - is increasingly elusive. Objectified, consti-tuted as antagonist to a preeminent gene/embryo/fetus, thematernal subject is disturbingly difficult to ascertain, articulate oraffirm.




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V. CODA

I want to return at the end to the question of fetal subjectivity, andits connection to race and racialization. I have been suggestingthat the civic and journalistic interventions in the case of KawanaAshley - through which she was charged with murder, anddescribed as having shot herself not in the stomach, but in thewomb - bespeak an increasing production of a fetal subject. Andyet this seems to me now not exactly right. Fetal subjectificationwould require an acknowledgement of specificity: of fetal race andfetal class, too. Kawana Ashley pulled the trigger because shecould not obtain an abortion. Moreover, an act of advocacy or pro-tection on behalf of the unborn fetus was what first blocked herabortion, and then resulted in her being charged with "murder"when she attempted suicide. There is a powerful irony here: thevery same racial and economic marginality that characterizesKawana Ashley (and that somehow casts her as 'beyond interven-tion') will characterize upon its birth the fetus that now is deemedworth legal and journalistic representation and intervention. Wemust wonder why both the civil state and the fourth estate intervene soforcefully on behalf of her fetus, only to abandon that advocacy once thefetus becomes a person whose status is both racially and economicallyspecific.

I want to suggest some tentative conclusions we might drawfrom the Kawana Ashley case about the general process of fetalsubjectification in the United States and perhaps in Euro-Americain general.

First: the fetus seems to be understood as white, when it is the productof state protection through intervention. Whether it is unseen, or ismedically-visualized, the fetus exists in the realm of the imaginary.And in our Euro-American culture, the imaginary subject is white.Perhaps, in fact, I should modify that, to say that the fetus seems tobe understood as white and male. To the extent that the fetus takes onthe representational burden (in both the civic and semiotic sense)of our culture, it is most likely to be the white, male subject of theliberal civil state. Of course, to the extent that the fetus is thesubject of negative eugenic measures, it is most likely to be under-stood as non-white: black, hispanic, or racially "Other."

Second: the fetal subject is the impossible subject. As pure potential,it is powerful precisely because it never comes into being. At birth,it ceases being that fetal subject; it becomes, instead, a baby, with




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the specific positionalities of class, race, sex, and all so on, thatconstitute the human individual.

Third: the fetal subject is the ventriloquizable subject. The fetus hasbecome such a magnet for both advocacy and representation pre-cisely because it has neither specificity nor voice. Advocacy for thefetus, like advocacy for animals, asserts the rights of a subject whoexists as pure potential, and who can be spoken for preciselybecause there will never be a subject to voice a contradiction.

For a mother to harness representational powers equivalent tothe emerging fetal subject, then, what must she become? Theanswer is both laughable and, somehow, familiar: she must bewhite and male, she must be pure potential; she must be ventrilo-quizable. And indeed, in the last decade or so, as fetal representa-tions gained increasing cultural prominence, there was a parallelincrease in the representational prominence of such a new mater-nal subject: first with the "motherly" Tootsie, then Mrs. Doubtfirethe nanny or surrogate mother, and - finally and most recently -the pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger, genuine biological mother-to-be in the 1994 movie, "Junior."

NOTES

1 For further discussion of the role of visualization technology in the develop-ment of reproductive technology, see Squier, 1994.2 Barbara Duden argues that:the demise in the social status of quickening [is] an event that brings an impor-tant paradox to the surface: in the course of the nineteenth century, femaleinnards and interiority become medically, administratively, and judicially publicwhile, at the same time, the female exterior is privatized ideologically and cultur-ally. These opposed but linked tendencies are both characteristic moments in thesocial construction of 'woman' as a scientific fact, as well as in the creation of thecitizen in industrial society (1993, p. 95).

REFERENCES

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tilization until the end of the eighth week of gestation, when it becomes knownas a fetus/ National Institutes of Health Final Report of the Human Embryo ResearchPanel, September 27, p. 103.




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: National Institutes of Health Final Report of the Human Embryo Research Panel,September 27.

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Duden, B.: 1993, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn,Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Dunn, K.: 1989, Geek Love, Knopf, New York.Goldberg, D.T.: 1993, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning,

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Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, London.Muller, H.: 1936, Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future, Victor Gollancz

Ltd., London.Nelkin, D. et ai: 1995, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon, W.H. Freeman

and Co., New York.Perlez, J.: 1995, 'Warsaw bans a clinic's in vitro fertilization treatments,' Sunday

March 19, p. 6, The New York Times, International Section.Petchesky, R.P.: 1987, 'Foetal images: The power of visual culture in the politics of

reproduction,' in M. Stanworth (ed.), Reproductive Technologies: Gender, Mother-hood and Medicine, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Rose, H.: 1994, Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of theSciences, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Squier, S.: 1994, Babies in Bottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of ReproductiveTechnology, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick.




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