117 LT -
Fetal Distraction?: Studying Pregnancy in the Age of Personhood
Friday, June 2, 2017: 1:45 PM-3:15 PM
BRESL 209 (Hofstra University)
Organizer:
Emily Seitz, Pennsylvania State University
Comment:
Johanna Schoen, Rutgers University
Session Abstract
Notions of the fetus are at the center of difficult conversations about pregnancy, maternity, and personhood in academia and activism alike. This session builds on a growing body of literature that puts the fetus at its center, while also interrogating the contemporary medical and political contexts that elevated the idea of the fetus to this position. This panel asks what histories of the fetus mean for women’s historians. How can we balance between the inclusion of the fetus in histories of pregnancy with a sustained focus on the pregnant woman? This lightening session includes brief presentations on a variety of topics: lesbian fertility in the 1970s, the early twentieth-century campaign to lower infant mortality in the U.S., questions of legal definitions of personhood after Roe, the dangers of global aid discourses focusing on low fertility goals, the legality of third party oocyte donation, and the benefits of policy framed in terms of whole women’s health. While these presentations are primarily historical in nature, we include the perspectives of activists and global public health workers who are also unable to escape this historical development of tensions between female autonomy and fetal personhood. Taken as a whole, this lightening panel is designed to both celebrate and critique the rise of histories of the fetus, while also considering new directions we can take and new problems we must grapple with as we continue both undertaking this research and understanding that its very existence is historically contingent.
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See more of: Lightning Session
See more of: Lightning Session