Lynn Morgan, professor of anthropology
at MHC, has edited a new collection of essays, Fetal Subjects,
Feminist Positions.
The human fetus presents a paradox to many feminists. On one hand, feminists are committed to reproductive rights. On the other hand, there has been a marked movement in American society to confer the status of personhood on the unborn.
The inherent tensions between these points of view and questions raised by society's emerging, and often contradictory, views of the fetus form the basis for a new collection of essays, Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions (Penn, 1999), edited by Lynn Morgan, professor of anthropology at MHC, and Meredith Michaels, research associate in the Department of Philosophy at Smith College.
Acknowledging that this work explores one of the most difficult areas in current feminist thought, Morgan and Meredith note in the volume's introductory essay that "feminist reluctance to engage in reflexive discussion of fetuses has been a 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."
According to Morgan, discussion of the fetus and its meaning, its degree of personhood, "is an issue that lots of feminists don't want to touch. Our challenge here is to try to open a dialogue regarding these issues." To this end, Morgan and Michael have gathered fifteen essays written by feminist scholars from a number of disciplines to consider such questions as the evolution in ways of thinking about the fetus in the ethical, medical, legal, social and cultural arenas.
Since Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, there has been increased interest in the status of the human fetus in American society, according to Morgan. This interest is due to many factors, including lower fertility and infant mortality rates, the advent of reproductive imaging technologies such as ultrasound, and efforts by anti-abortion advocates. There has also been a proliferation of fetal images in popular culture. Taken together, these trends signal that the fetus has moved beyond the realms of law and medicine to become an entity that is being defined by a variety of forces, including popular culture.
In an essay written by Morgan for the volume, she traces how advances in medical science in this century, especially embryology and human biology, have helped shape societal views of the unborn. The scientific worldview that has risen to dominance in American society has had significant cultural implications for our ideas of what embryos and fetuses signify in both public discourse and private experience--views inherently different from those held by other cultures.
Divided into three sections, Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions engages with three broadly defined questions: an overview of the history of how the fetus has been and is perceived, a look at how the image of the fetus is manipulated for current political and cultural purposes, and an examination of how the status of the fetus affects the status of women and the issue of reproductive freedom. According to Morgan, she does not expect Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions to settle the contentious questions raised in the deeply charged cultural debate over reproductive choice. Instead, she hopes that the book will set in motion a dialogue on a variety of difficult issues.
As scholar Valerie Hartouni writes in an epilogue to the volume, "Notwith-standing its presence in our daily lives, its circulation through the culture, and its apparent viability, at least representationally, the fetus-as-social-subject does not retire the controversies in which it appeared to play so pivotal a part. It leaves unanswered the many obvious moral questions commentators seemed to assume its status as subject would swiftly settle, and forcefully reiterates as central the problem of determining what significance to attach to it as a social subject, indeed, of determining what exactly its status as subject 'means.' "
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