Prenatal Diagnosis in Postwar Vietnam: Power, Subjectivity, and Citizenship

Across the world, routine pregnancy care is expanding to include ultrasound imaging and other prenatal diagnostic technologies. Yet, despite their global proliferation, hardly any anthropological research has examined how such technologies are employed outside Euro-America. In this article, I invest...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:American anthropologist 2007-03, Vol.109 (1), p.153-163
Main Author: GAMMELTOFT, TINE M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abortion
Argumentation
Childbirth
Children
Children & youth
Citizenship
Collectivity
Consonance
Cultural values
Ethnology
Families & family life
Family. Family relations
Fetus
Hospitals
Ideology
Individualism
Interpersonal relations
Mothers
Post-war history
Power
Pregnancy
Prenatal diagnosis
Reproductive technologies
Sexual reproduction
Social structure and social relations
Southeast Asian culture
Subjectivity
Technology
Ultrasonography
ultrasound
Vietnam
Vietnamese
Woman status
Women's health
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Summary:Across the world, routine pregnancy care is expanding to include ultrasound imaging and other prenatal diagnostic technologies. Yet, despite their global proliferation, hardly any anthropological research has examined how such technologies are employed outside Euro-America. In this article, I investigate how pregnant women in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, handle the hard choices that ultrasonographies confront them with when a fetal anomaly is detected and a decision must be made to either maintain or terminate the pregnancy. Whereas research conducted in North America, in consonance with the emphasis on individualism in advanced liberal societies, frames prenatal diagnosis in terms of individual "moral pioneering," I show how Vietnamese women turn the choices they have to make into issues of collectivity, kinship, social belonging, and shared responsibility. The general argument advanced is that a comprehensive understanding of individual reproductive actions and intentions necessarily involves close consideration of local configurations of power, subjectivity, and citizenship.
ISSN:0002-7294
1548-1433
DOI:10.1525/aa.2007.109.1.153