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‘Smoking is harmful to your baby's health’. While birth was no longer seen as necessarily the crucial boundary in human development, the maternal body was conceptualized as a conduit for dangerous substances. In 1970s America corporate policies banning women from work in potentially teratogenic environments were perceived by many as a triumph of workplace safety campaigns. But for some female blue-collar workers they attempted to limit women’s entry into traditionally male occupations. For feminists they were an expression of a wide-reaching surveillance of the female body that extended, in the same period, to prosecuting pregnant women for using illegal drugs and alcohol. Should this American Cancer Society poster from 1980 be seen as part of the same trend?
Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine.
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Between a patient and a late abortion. Obstetricians had traditionally assumed that what was good for mother was good for baby. But as campaigners fought to legalize abortion, a new medical discipline centred on the fetus as a patient in its own right. In the early 1960s, the obstetrician and anti-abortion activist William Liley developed a transfusion procedure to protect rhesus-positive fetuses of rhesus-negative mothers. By the 1980s, fetal medicine had moved from transfusions to massively invasive surgery. The discipline conceptualized the fetus as an autonomous being enclosed in a separate and occasionally harmful maternal receptacle. Yet the uses of tools developed for fetal protection departed from their original aims. Amniocentesis, the technique of drawing off amniotic fluid through a hollow catheter, was originally for treatment and
diagnosis. Under liberal abortion laws and with its safety improved by ultrasound guidance, it became a screening method for prenatal diagnosis of disorders framed as sufficient grounds for late ‘termination’. Was the fetus a patient or a potential abortion?
Abortion wars
Anti-abortionists mobilized images of embryos and fetuses in their political struggle.
From the late 1960s, campaigns to legalize abortion succeeded in most Western countries. Inspired by the second wave of feminism, fears of overpopulation and the thalidomide disaster, anti-abortion laws were repealed in Britain in 1967, the United States in 1973 and France in 1975. But groups for whom this challenged deeply-held and once taken-for-granted beliefs now organized to oppose abortion. Once used by campaigners for decriminalization, images of embryos and fetuses were appropriated to argue for the continuity and inviolability of human life from conception.
This originally American visual culture harks back to the use of images of children in the movements against the Vietnam War and nuclear power, but ‘pro-life’ politics leaned to the right from the start. The video Silent Scream, which claimed to provide an ultrasound window into the suffering of a 12-week fetus during abortion, was shown in Ronald Reagan’s White House. Feminists and
medical experts accused its makers of distortion. Visual culture was at the centre of the new politics of reproduction.
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Demonstrating for the legalization of abortion. This newspaper photograph shows demonstrators marching in 1967 in front of the largest Roman Catholic cathedral in the United States, St. Patrick’s in New York. They protest against Church opposition to liberalization of the New York State law on abortion. Typically, their placards show no images. The public had expected some relaxation of the Church position on abortion, oral contraceptives and sex outside marriage, but the 1968 papal encyclical ‘Of human life’ (Humanae vitae) confirmed the traditional standpoints. In 1970, New York followed Colorado (1967) as the second state to lift all restrictions on elective abortions by a licensed physician, in the first 24 weeks.
New York World Journal Tribune, 12 March 1967.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, NYWT&S Collection (LC-USZ62-122778).
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Demonstrating for the legalization of abortion, 1967
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| ‘How to teach the pro-life story’. ‘In our presentation, we would show the eighteen-week LIFE Magazine cover, and ask, is this being human? Subsequently, we will show very human looking babies at sixteen, fourteen, twelve, and eleven weeks (…) We will then show them one more visual at six weeks, and then we’ll show no visuals under six weeks (...) We will not show visuals under six weeks, because we feel that if we do, the audience may change their minds’, instructed the ‘pro-life’ campaigner Barbara Willke in her 1973 manual, How to teach the pro-life story. A nurse, she developed this approach in the 1960s with her physician husband during a road-show to promote Christian family values. The cover of their widely read and reprinted tutorial shows a simply dressed female ‘pro-life’ campaigner on a TV set holding a photograph of a man’s hand with ‘tiny human feet’ of a 10-week embryo.
Cover of Dr & Mrs J. C. Willke, How to teach the pro-life story, Cincinatti, Ohio: Hayes Publishing Inc., 1975. 21.5 x 14 cm.
Hayes Publishing Co.
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‘How to teach the pro-life story’, 1973
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