ABSTRACT
Babies, once primarily dealt with within the world of women, are the subject of theological proclamations, medical surveillance, and international policy. The push to regulate and monitor, which emerges in varying degrees from the expressed interests of medical researchers, lawyers, doctors, genetic counselors, and client-consumers, typically assumes that the birth of healthy babies is a function of equitably distributed diagnostic medicine. The new opportunity of having experts provide information as to what kind of baby a pregnant woman is likely to bear reshapes the experience of pregnancy at the same time that it devalues the lives of the living who may be of the “wrong” sex or chromosomal structure. Birth on a thoroughly poisoned Earth is likely to be so problematic that the choice of nonintervention will be totally lost. In a society of isolated individuals where progress is measured in terms of scientific advance, experts’ concern with the health of “populations” readily translates into complex forms of social control.
