Of Human Born
Fetal Lives, 1800â1950
Caroline Arni, Kate Sturge
- 368 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Of Human Born
Fetal Lives, 1800â1950
Caroline Arni, Kate Sturge
About This Book
A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman's body has, once again, become a fraught issueâfrom abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal riskâ Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of "life before birth."Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of "fetal life" by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother's living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of "the human" in the age of scientific empiricism.Arni revises the narrative that the "modern embryo" is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman's body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.