91桃色

At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman鈥檚 body has, once again, become a fraught issue鈥攆rom abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk鈥�Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of 鈥渓ife before birth.鈥�

Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of 鈥渇etal life鈥� by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother鈥檚 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 鈥渢he human鈥� in the age of scientific empiricism.

Arni revises the narrative that the 鈥渕odern embryo鈥� is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman鈥檚 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.