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Tatjana Buklijas, Sara Dubow, Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America, Social History of Medicine, Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 266–267, https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkr156
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The diverse uses and understandings of the fetus (here including embryos) in science, medicine and, especially, the public arena over the past half a century have been of great interest to scholars from various fields. Feminist social scientists in particular have engaged with the ways in which the fetus was constituted as a collection of cells, baby, child, independent individual and patient, and used for diverse political purposes: see for instance the work of Rosalind Pollack Petchesky and Monica Casper. Yet, there is little history of the public fetus before the 1970s, aside from Barbara Duden's pioneering work and rare examples such as Cornelia Usborne's and Atina Grossmann's histories of the female body in Weimar Germany. So, Sara Dubow's book, based on her 2003 PhD thesis, is a welcome addition to this field. Dubow ‘historicizes the public fetus of the 1980s and the 1990s in a larger context, contending that the meanings ascribed to the fetus from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century have had more to do with social values and political circumstances than with biology or theology’ (p. 3). She promises to engage with diverse literature and approaches to the various meanings and constructions of the fetus in Western culture and American history. The book, firmly set within the geographic and political boundaries of the USA, heavily based on the analysis of legal cases, and using hardly any comparative literature, is, however, far more ‘American’ than ‘Western’. This focus does not detract from its value; indeed, Dubow's work provides a much needed history to the largely American-focused, late twentieth-century scholarship.