It’s coming up on thirty years since I published THE TENTATIVE PREGNANCY. The technology’s changed in some ways. Information comes earlier. And it’s routinized. What used to be a problem facing relatively few pregnant women -- those who were over 35 or so, those who had a family history of a genetic disorder of some sort -- is now a problem facing every pregnancy in America. Or so it would be if people faced the problem.
Prenatal screening for conditions which have no solution but abortion is routine. And routinely unacknowledged. People do an ultrasound scan for the joy of ‘seeing the baby.’ But the ultrasounds weren’t introduced for fun, aren’t paid for by insurance companies for fun, aren’t done as routine medical care for fun. Ultrasound, along with maternal blood tests, are being done to diagnose conditions in the fetus, and those conditions are not treatable.
Abortions following prenatal testing are nothing like abortions to get ‘unpregnant,’ abortions to just return oneself to normal after an accidental, unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. These abortions, abortions because this particular fetus should not become one’s baby, are experienced very differently. In THE TENTATIVE PREGNANCY I showed how painful this was for the women involved, women who were told how lucky they were to have choices, but often experienced themselves as horrifically trapped.
Two new books cast interesting light on all this from two very different countries. Germany recognizes the eugenic underpinnings of all prenatal screening. While Americans assure me that this has nothing to do with eugenics, it’s just about having healthy babies, Germans have been forced by their history to recognize that having healthy babies, or being ‘well born,’ is what eugenics means. Silja Samerski did a book on the DECISION TRAPS that people are facing when they have genetic testing. She asked me to write a preface, and it’s available below.
Tine M. Gammeltoft, wrote HAUNTING IMAGES: A CULTURAL ACCOUNT OF SELECTIVE REPRODUCTION IN VIETNAM, and my review of that book is also available below. The Vietnamese are in an interesting position because while Americans and Germans too can see ‘fetal defects’ as acts of god, of random cruelty in the world, the Vietnamese see them as war crimes, the ongoing consequences of Agent Orange, and it shapes their discussion.
Context shapes everything of course. But pregnancy is also a context: the nature of pregnancy as an intimate social relationship shapes women’s experiences of prenatal testing and selective abortion that Americans, caught in an absurdly fraught discussion of abortion, cannot afford to see. Until the trap is sprung.
If you missed the link to my preface in DECISION TRAPS, click here.
To access my review of HAUNTING IMAGES, click here.