ABSTRACT
For centuries, babies have had a difficult time getting adults to accept them as real people with real feelings having real experiences—a situation which their twentieth century cyborgification has only enhanced. Deep prejudices have shadowed them for centuries: babies were thought of as subhuman, prehuman, or, as sixteenth-century authority Luis deGranada put it, “a lower animal in human form.” This loss of humanity was further elaborated in the Age of Science. In the last hundred years, scientific authorities have robbed babies of their cries by calling them “echoes” or “random sound”; robbed them of their smiles by calling them “gas”; robbed them of their memories by calling them “fantasies”; and robbed them of their pain by calling it a “reflex.” In short, as anthropologists (Shaw 1974; Davis-Floyd 1992) have shown, in most American hospitals since the early part of this century, babies have been treated as the nonsentient products of the obstetrical manufacturing process called birth (see Introduction, this volume).
