ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the place and significance of reproductive medicine as a foundational condition of possibility for the emergence of human genetic science and transformed and genetified understandings of health and illness. It argues that current understandings of genetic risk, driven by but not limited to reproductive medical contexts, derive in part from earlier, historically constituted medical narratives of danger associated with female bodies, specifically of women as dangerous bearers, carers and carriers. Thomas Lemke provides an interesting and useful parsing of the transformed constitution of 'risk' in the wake of genetics, and one that is particularly apposite for the focus of this chapter. Contagion grows currency of obstetric ideas of the female body mapped into a complex matrix of anxieties about sexual morality and familial and reproductive 'fitness'. It suggests that disproportionately weighted onto the female body, whose reproductive processes are already viewed with concern, if not opprobrium within dominant obstetric and legal discourse.
