Lynn
M. Morgan’s ethnography, Icons of Life,
delves into how historical events have shaped American’s view of embryos and
fetuses. Morgan discovers a small collection of preserved human fetuses in a
dusty science department storeroom at Mount Holyoke College. She is told that
the collection is part of a large-scale embryo collecting project based at John
Hopkins during the first half of the twentieth century. Morgan then unveils the
social, political, and cultural implications resulting from that project. I
enjoyed Lynn Morgan’s ethnography. The depth of her elaborations made it easy
to follow and understand the connections she drew between the Carnegie Human
Embryo Collection and implications that have evolved. It is interesting how
this project had valuable scientific contributions, yet it deeply impacted how
the American culture views fetuses. Morgan’s reoccurring theme of how the collected
embryos were completely alienated from women took me by surprise. Pictures of
fetuses typically do not include the mother that carried it. I never realized the
severed connection between fetuses and their mothers; yet this is a theme that
is easily observed within the American culture. The cultural assumption of how
all dead fetuses are immediately linked to abortion was another theme that I
had never considered.
This
ethnography was inspired by Morgan’s anthropological fieldwork in Ecuador
during the early 1990s, where she was interviewing rural mothers “about the
status of fetuses and the morality of abortion” (Morgan 2009:XII). She
discovered how the mothers, who are all Catholic, saw abortion as a sin not
because they see it as murder, but because it is an act of self-mutilation, and
they are taking God’s will into their own hands. Through her fieldwork, Morgan
came to the realization that the link between the status of the fetus and the
morality of abortion belonged to her American culture, thus prompting this
ethnography.
Icons of Life deals with the place of embryo and fetal
specimens in American history. It draws on the history of a large embryo collecting
project based at the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of
Embryology, but is not a history of that department. It features the anatomist
and embryo collector par excellence, Franklin P. Mall, but is not a biography.
It touches on the political and philosophical implications of anatomical embryo
collecting, but is neither a political manifesto nor a philosophical treatise.
Instead, I argue that the history of human embryo collecting had an enormous
unacknowledged influence on how we think, in cultural terms, about what embryos
are and what they mean. Collecting practices, in other words, had social,
political, and cultural implications. [Morgan 2009:XII]
Franklin
P. Mall pushed doctors to actively collect any specimens that came into their
possession, usually through miscarriages or hysterectomies. These specimens
allowed scientists to physically see what was previously hidden within a
mother’s womb. “Embryo collecting was born as a collaborative effort between
research scientists, clinicians, and pregnant (or formally pregnant) women”
(Morgan 2009:6). Mall and his colleagues
successfully established an embryo collecting tradition in the United States.
This tradition lead to a shift in culture, for “embryo collecting became
thoroughly normalized and unremarkable” (Morgan 2009:9). Normalizing the
collection of fetuses and establishing the tradition within the “players”
involved made science the “owners” of the collected embryos and fetuses. This
collection paved way to “the very concept of ‘development,’ conceived as a
cumulative process of unfolding” (Morgan 2009:7). This lead to the
embryological view of life as the origin
story, rather than an origin story.
“The embryological view is told as one of the greatest, oldest human truths. Its
legitimacy is enhanced by being linked with other powerful forms of knowledge
in our society, especially science and religion” (Morgan 2009:8). In class, we
have discussed how biomedicine is strongly weaved into institutions, and
therefore our culture. Morgan claims “embryos and fetuses are thoroughly
infused with culture, even (or especially) when tightly swaddled in the cloak
of science” (2009:8).
In
1933-34, there was a prenatal exhibit of forty specimens at the Century of
Progress Exposition in Chicago. This exhibit further illustrates how the
embryological view of life penetrated American culture. The exhibit “depicted
human development as a seamless trajectory from conception to birth. Curiously,
it did this by glossing over the reality that pregnancy is often interrupted,
as these bottled fetuses so obviously demonstrated” (Morgan 2009:134). “The
1933-34 exhibit of prenatal development proffered a biological basis for what
was more accurately the cultural production of embryos and of the embryological
view of development” (Morgan 2009:135). The exhibit deflected attention from
the women who were connected to the fetuses.
Science
as the “owners” of the embryos and fetuses uncoupled the connection between the
mother’s and their fetuses. Morgan states, “Women’s lives and stories were
never the embryo collector’s concern, any more than the love letter inside the
envelope might matter to a stamp collector” (2009:107). This analogy effectively
exposes how women were not given credit for their contribution to the embryo
collection, and therefore science. Sarah Franklin argues how the embryological
view of development can be particularly hard to apprehend reflexively, because
it tends to obscure the social aspects of reproduction at the same time that it
becomes the basis for their cultural production (1991:197). “This double move,
of displacing and replacing the social with the biological…enables a woman’s
pregnancy, the work of nurturing a child, the meaning of motherhood, the social
meaning of personhood (in terms of kinship, identity, naming, reciprocity,
interdependence, etc.) all to be reduced to one dimension… biological life” (Franklin
1991:200). Morgan connects Franklin’s argument with the Carnegie Human Embryo
Collection, “In the way that specimens were culturally defined and collecting
was practiced, embryos were made to be absolutely alienable from women and
absolutely inalienable from the embryologists” (2009:89).
Morgan
explains how currently, “images of embryos and fetuses speak−loudly−on a range
of contentious topics including gender, abortion, and reproductive
technologies” (2009:187). I agree with
Morgan’s statement; American culture adheres various topics with embryos.
Morgan elucidates how “as embryologists materialized the embryonic body and
claimed it for science, they authorized themselves to control and shape the
interpretations that would be made of it” (2009:188). On the contrary,
embryologists claimed that the embryonic body spoke for itself (Morgan
2009:188). Acknowledging that the embryologists’ interpretations were based on
a rational, unemotional examination of biological evidence, Morgan goes on to
explain how “we can see the lasting social consequences of the knowledge they
[embryologists] produced. They helped to construe the human embryo as an
autonomous actor, detachable from women’s bodies and motivated solely by
biological forces” (2009:188). Embryologist, therefore, introduced the embryos
into political debates by allowing the embryos to take sides in the culture
wars over topics such as evolution and women’s suffrage (Morgan 2009:188).
Fetal
images then began to seep into popular culture as symbols of life (Morgan
2009:197). Embryos and fetuses began to move out of the laboratory, and into
magazines, advertisements, and books. After the 1960s, it was rare to admit
that the fetal images used to represent life were actually created from dead
specimens, specimens that were likely a part of the Carnegie Human Embryo
Collection. As embryo collecting fell out of fashion, a shift in the view of
embryos occurred. In 2002, a popular book titled From Conception to Birth by Alexander Tsiaras depicted brightly
colored visualizations of embryos and fetuses. During this time, birthing books
to inform younger mothers of the development of their unborn child depicted
images of embryos and fetuses as various stages of the gestational period.
These books are an example of how embryos and fetuses began to symbolize life.
Morgan points out how “ironically, most of the images in the book are based on
scans of ex utero dead embryos and fetuses” (2009:220). As lifelike, animated
embryo and fetal images were “becoming ubiquitous, they [were] increasingly
juxtaposed against another set of images that depicts dead embryos and fetuses
(including specimens) as tragic, threatening figures. Lifelike versus lifeless”
(Morgan 2009:228). The latter imagery is used heavily in anti-abortion
propaganda. This juxtaposition lead to a general connection within American
society that all dead fetuses are the result of abortion.
Since this ethnography was inspired
by fieldwork in Ecuador, most of the research was conducted in archives and
libraries. Morgan’s own curiosity fueled this work, and therefore she has a
prominent influence on the work. Morgan wanted to uncover why the culture in
the United States automatically linked dead fetuses with abortion. This
prompted her discovery of a small embryo collection at Mount Holyoke College.
She learned that “the heyday of embryo collecting took place between 1913 and
1944, although the earliest efforts began around 1890 and the project lasted
into the 1960s and beyond” (Morgan 2009:3). While completing this work, Morgan
was limited to the remnants of the era, what she could dig up in the archives
and libraries. She was limited to what she could decipher from Mall’s
handwriting, for she could not directly interview him. Morgan did not have
access to a first-hand perception of the era, such as the information she would
get from directly interviewing Mall himself, which is a weakness of this work.
On
the other hand, the decades that have passed since the embryo collecting was
done also plays into a strength of the work. The time that has passed allows
the implications of the project to surface, which allows Morgan to expose
insights on the long-term affects of the project. Morgan also had access to
historians, librarians, archivist, and embryologists who have done specific
research that Morgan was able to build upon. For example, Morgan draws upon
Sarah Franklin’s argument of how the embryological view of development obscures
the social aspects of reproduction at the same time that it becomes the basis
for their cultural production, and then further elaborates on that theme. Morgan
had access to other respected professionals, and that helps strengthen her
work. Having various professionals in different fields allows more perspectives
to be represented, and thus widening the scope of relevance.
The
Carnegie Human Embryo Collection was done in America, and although other embryo
collections have been done in other countries, this project directly affected
the fetus’ role in American Culture. Morgan gives an example of how she was giving
a presentation at the University of Washington, where a foreign student voiced
how she did not find Alexander Tsiaras book (From Conception to Birth) “fascinating, but vulgar. The whole idea
of such as book, she said, showed extremely bad taste. Her reaction reinforced
my [Morgan’s] impression that fetal displays condensed cultural assumptions, in
this case about fetus-obsessed Americans” (Morgan 2009:221). This ethnography
contributes to how the American public views embryos and fetuses, as well as
the associations specific to this culture.
This
ethnography has various practical uses. Morgan presents multiple insights on
the unseen implications of science. Morgan’s observations can be used as case
study of how medical knowledge shapes social representations, a theme that has
been discussed in lecture. In this case, Morgan shows how medical knowledge
gained through the Carnegie Human Embryo Collection lead to the embryonic view
of life, and how that view resulted in several alternations in the American
culture. Prior to the project, Americans pictured a tiny human growing inside
its mother’s womb. After the project, Americans are able to tie a picture of
specific embryo or fetus with each week of the gestation period. The project
expanded the medical knowledge of embryos and fetuses while also shaping their
representations within the American society. Birn defines global health as
transcending borders, for it considers the health needs of the people of this
planet above concerns of particular nations. With that in mind, I do not think
that Morgan’s ethnography is about a global health issue. The implications that
Morgan explores solely affect American culture, and therefore this issue is confined
to one country. As someone who grew up within that culture, this ethnography raises
several questions, such as if our cultural view of embryos and fetuses is
disastrous? Does uncoupling a mother and her fetus allow us to legitimize the
legality of abortion in our society? Since it was an election year, I noticed
both parties discussed abortion and reproductive technologies. One main
difference between the two prominent parties in the United States is their view
on abortion. This politicization of abortion leads me to wonder if it is
related to the cultural assumption of how all dead fetuses are the result of
abortion. Natural miscarriages are generally unacknowledged within our society,
and that may leave women with uncertainty on how to cope with a miscarriage.
Although this ethnography leaves me with a few questions, Lynn Morgan does an exceptional
job of dissecting the historical events that lead to American society’s current
representations of embryos and fetuses.
Franklin, Sara
1991 Fetal
Fascinations: New Dimensions to the Medical-Scientific Construction of Fetal
Personhood. London: HarperCollins.
Morgan, Lynn M
2009 Icons of
Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
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