“With This You Can Meet Your Baby”: Fetal Personhood and Audible Heartbeats in Oaxacan Public Health

Abstract

This article examines how amplified fetal heartbeats may be used to make claims about fetuses' social presence. These claims are supported by the Mexican Public Health system's selection of the maternal-child relationship as a key site of clinical intervention, intertwining medical and moral discourses. Drawing on the robust literature on cross-cultural propositions of "fetal personhood," this analysis uses ethnographic material from public health institutions in Oaxaca, Mexico, to explore how doctors use diagnostic technology to materialize fetuses for their patients. I argue that Spanish's epistemological distinction between saber (to have knowledge about) and conocer (to be acquainted with) is key to how diagnostic technologies may be deployed to make social claims. I use one doctor's attempts to use technology to shift her patient from saber to conocer as illustrative of underlying cultural logics about fetal embodiment and its proof. Focused on the under-theorized socio-medical deployment of audio fetal heartbeat technology, this article suggests that sound-in addition to sight-is a potent tool for constructing fetal personhood.

Racial Politics of Frozen Embryo Personhood in the US Antiabortion Movement

“…“It is both the site and source of ongoing cultural contests and always under construction as a self‐evident fact of nature” (Hartouni , 300). While the idea of embryos as persons has become a central concern for some US antiabortion activists, this notion is not universally agreed upon cross‐culturally (Conklin and Morgan ; Gammeltoft ; Howes‐Mischel ; LaFleur ; Morgan ; Morgan and Michaels ) nor is the ontological status of embryos a concern for all people (Morgan ; Roberts ; Strathern ). Given this variance within different sociohistorical and cultural contexts, feminist anthropologists recently emphasized the need to “examine the social dramas to which embryos are made to speak today” (Andaya and Mishtal , 51).…”

“You Can Learn Merely by Listening to the Way a Patient Walks through the Door”: The Transmission of Sensory Medical Knowledge

“…Works in this field bring together medical anthropology and the anthropology of the senses, attending to sensations in studying the illness experience (Hinton et al. , 143), and examining the role of sensory practices such as sound and touch within diagnostic work (Classen ; Howes‐Mischel ), medical training (Prentice Rice ; van Drie ), and therapeutic encounters (Hinojosa ; Sieler ; Throop ; van Dongen and Elema ). The analysis I present in this article contributes to three areas of inquiry relevant to the study of medicine, knowledge, and the senses: (nonvisual) sensory medical education, embodied learning, and senses and the cultural values they carry.…”

“…In the context of science, the gaze has been interpreted as a mechanism used to create a perceptual distance so that an entity can be examined objectively; in other words, “A capacity to make external and concrete, and hence situate as perceptually ‘objective’” (Rice , 294). The objectifying gaze is especially relevant to the realm of medicine, which has been associated with visual processes considered essential in the creation and reproduction of (objective) medical knowledge of the body (Draper , 776; Foucault , 107; Howes‐Mischel , 194; Hsu , 7; Maslen , 54; Prentice , 6; Rice , 295; Sieler , 328; Throop , 424; van Drie , 171) . The case study discussed here allows questioning this visual dominancy in medical training, examining the role of nonvisual practices including auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic sensations within the teaching and learning of medical knowledge…”

Untitled

“…The process of detecting fetal heartbeats is called auscultation, like listening with a stethoscope, but the fetal heartbeat isn't really "heard"-it is a sound produced by the devices of listening, for a specific audience. 6 The fetal heartbeat as heard through ultrasound devices is as completely mediated as fetal images, but, especially in early pregnancy, can be experienced by the pregnant woman as more intuitively legible (Howes-Mischel, 2015). In the sonic effect of the fetal heartbeat, there is an effective and affective articulation of an individualized fetal heart.…”