Abstract
For this project I describe the socio-historical development of a particular
application of genetic prenatal diagnosis, in terms of changing social relations
that govern an ethics of reproductive choice. I examine ways that medicine and
government articulate prenatal diagnosis to problematise the maternal body and
govern women's reproductive choices about chromosomal abnormality in the
fetus.
Since its introduction in the early 1970s, the major use of prenatal
diagnosis has been to detect chromosomal abnormalities-in particular, Down
syndrome-in the fetus. Medico-scientific knowledge claims negotiated in
everyday practices in the genetic counselling clinic between health professionals
and their clients are situated within broader social relations. Negotiations
between medicine and government have produced technoscientific possibilities,
realised with greater or lesser success in the co-construction of a workable
prenatal diagnosis standardised package. I describe how these socio-technical
relations have produced similarities and differences across time, and national
and professional boundaries. My analysis draws on observations in three genetic
counselling clinics, and of the health professionals' other work activities. I also
draw on interviews with them and other actors in that arena, as well as claims
made about prenatal diagnosis technologies in the medico-scientific literature. I
analyse my data using concepts developed in social worlds/arenas theory within
a Foucauldian framework of social relations that govern the body.
Since the early formation of a standardised package of genetic counselling
about amniocentesis, ethical decisions about prenatal diagnosis have identified multiple parts of the self to be governed. This ethics has relied on a duty to make
genetically responsible decisions as a particular way to relate to oneself,
although it has been expressed in different ways. Newer technologies have
articulated greater ethical possibilities for governing the self by co-constructing
new ways of assembling the constituent components. Throughout, there have
been tensions between two major aims for governing the self: that of giving birth
to a healthy baby, and that of managing maternal rationality in order to act as an
autonomous rational individual. I have thus described how a woman's use of
prenatal diagnosis is not simply one of individual choice. Her decision is a
complex ethical one that is historically and socially contingent on relations
between medicine and government that present the maternal body in certain
ways for her to act upon herself.