Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Of Human Born: Fetal Lives, 1800-1950

Of Human Born: Fetal Lives, 1800-1950

Arni, Caroline
Sturge, Kate

Hardcover

Anatomy & PhysiologyBiologyGeneral Psychology

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1942130899
ISBN13: 9781942130895
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: Mar 12 2024
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.55
Height: 1.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences

At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman's body has, once again, become a fraught issue--from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk--Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of life before birth.

Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of fetal life by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother's living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of the human in the age of scientific empiricism.

Arni revises the narrative that the modern embryo is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman's body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.

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