ABSTRACT
When I set out to map the social impacts and cultural meanings of amniocentesis, one of the new reproductive technologies, beginning in the mid-1980s, I began by interviewing twenty-five women who had received what is so antiseptically labeled a “positive diagnosis.” They had discovered through chromosome testing that something was seriously wrong with the fetuses they were carrying; a decision to end or continue the pregnancy would therefore have to be made. Even now, the memory of how hard those women searched for words to describe their experiences with amniocentesis and selective abortion remains vivid to me; it impressed upon me the need to collectively construct new ways of talking appropriate to new ways of diagnosing. These women were working in a communicative system whose vocabulary is exclusively medical, whose grammar is technological, and whose syntax has yet to be negotiated. It was not always easy for them to frame alternative descriptions with which to more accurately represent their own experiences.
