From Object of Inquiry to Subject of Public Policy: A History of the Fetus

Abstract

Today, fetal images are ubiquitous. We encounter them everywhere—from family scrapbooks to car advertisements. Frequently, moreover, they are in- tended to send a political message—on billboards protesting legal abortion, for instance. But their pervasive presence is a recent phenomenon. A century ago, most people had no clear idea what a fetus might look like. Indeed, visitors to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago were able to view handcrafted wax models of embryos. These were objects of curiosity and scientific inquiry. Created by German artist-scientist Friedrich Ziegler, the model embryos were part of a display that also held wax models of starfish, sea urchins, beetle larvae, trout, chicks, and frogs, as well as of developing hearts, brains, skulls, eyes, ears, and teeth. Ziegler's exhibit, Sara Dubow tells us, won the fair's highest prize for its evolutionary and developmental illustration of the fair's theme: progress (p 25). Its inclusion in the exposition illustrates the growing scientific and public curiosity towards fetal life, which made the fetus an increasingly popular object of inquiry. Ourselves Unborn follows this history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The fetus has long captured the imagination of scientists and the public. And for more than a century, it has been an object of political controversy. Dubow eloquently illustrates how central a role the fetus has played over the past 150 years. She does so by following the history of the fetus from the criminalization of abortion in the latter part of the nineteenth century, to protective labor legislation that excluded women from certain jobs because of their reproductive capacity, to the criminal prosecution for child endanger- ment of pregnant substance-abusers. Ourselves Unborn joins a growing body of work that emerged in the mid-1990s about the fetus. Over the past two decades, historians, sociologists and medical anthropologists have analyzed the impact that medical technology has had on our view of pregnancy and