Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn

ISBN-13: 9780674212671 / Angielski / Twarda / 1993 / 134 str.

Barbara Duden

Opis

In earlier times, a woman knew she was pregnant when she experienced quickening - she felt movement within her. Today a woman relies on what she sees in a test result or a digital sonogram image to confirm her pregnancy. A private experience, once mediated by women themselves, has become a public experience interpreted and controlled by medical professionals. In this study, the author takes a closer look at this contemporary transformation of women's experience of pregnancy. She suggests that advances in technology, and parallel changes in public discourse, have transformed pregnancy into a managed process. The mother is defined as an ecosystem, and the foetus as an endangered species.