the Female Body GOVERNING

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paula saukko
This post is a classic example of lay health advice that mixes medical
knowledge, critical commentary on doctors, and intense personal
experience. It can be read as offering important and compassionate
peer advice to other women on the Internet on how to take care of
their health and negotiate with their possibly reluctant health-care
providers to avoid the tragedy of stillbirth. Still, the message can also
be read as drawing general conclusions from a specifi c sad case and
fueling an interventionist approach recommending the more potent,
prophylactic treatment in a situation of uncertainty. Both readings are
valid, and illustrate the diffi cult and highly emotional decisions women
need to make against new and uncertain medical knowledge when they
are pregnant.
However, what is unusual but interesting about the participant’s post
is that it contained a link to a web page her family had constructed
in memory of Thomas, her stillborn baby. The pages display scanned
images from the participant’s sonograms at several stages of gestation,
striking baby pictures of Thomas, dressed-up in a cute baby outfi t,
appearing as a beautiful newborn albeit with a bluish hue. There are
also pictures of mother and father holding him and pictures of family
members, including the other children of the family at the funeral. The
web pages contain a link to the list server’s information pages so that
“other tragedies will be avoided” as well as a link to an organization
that campaigns for issuing birth certifi cates for stillborn babies, legally
acknowledging the “birth” and individuality of the “beloved baby” (also
Layne, 2003).
The web pages on Thomas evoke many, partly contradictory, discourses.
When I initially analyzed Thomas’s web pages, I was reminded of a
presentation by a clinical geneticist. The presentation was constructed
around a series of slides depicting fetuses with genetic “defects.” Each
of the images focused on a “defective” part of the bodies of the fetuses,
such as missing limbs or extra fi ngers. They also constructed the fetuses
as clinical objects, de-individualizing them so that, for example, the head
and face of the fetus were in often covered with a white cloth. Much
has been written about the “ocular” fi xation of medicine, which defi nes
truth as something that is seen from a universal, objective point of view
(e.g., Haraway, 1988). The practice of looking for difference still applies
to clinical genetics, this time supported by biomolecular evidence of a
correspondence between physical appearance and DNA markers.
The images of Thomas are also visually powerful. However, in them
genetics and unborn fetuses/babies come together in a different way.
Rather than genetics being evoked as having identifi ed a defective
fetus to be eliminated; the picture of Thomas’s small dead body carries