Prosthetic Bodies: The Construction of the Fetus and the Couple as Patients in Reproductive Technologies

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This title combines insights, methods, and theories from the history of medicine, constructivist science and technology studies, and feminist theory. The double focus on IVF and related techniques, and fetal treatment and surgery, enables the identification of debatable tendencies within today’s reproductive medicine: the translation of ever more medical problems basically unrelated to women’s own reproductive health - and, in the case of fetal diagnosis and treatment, sometimes formerly even unrelated to reproduction as such - into medical indications for invasive, often highly experimental interventions in women’s bodies. The analyses show how, through the operations and workings of reproductive technologies themselves, as well as a variety of discursive mechanisms within scientific language, today’s recasting of men’s fertility problems and children’s congenital anomalies as women’s reproductive problems comes to appear inevitable. It challenges the ability of traditional forms of medical ethics and law to adequately identify this incremental process.