Roundtable: Beyond the Medical Management of Pregnancy Loss

Tue 11 February 2020

Department of Public Health & Primary Care

Dr Sheelagh McGuinness
'Respect, Ritual, Recognition: Beyond the Sensitive Disposal of Pregnancy Remains'

Decades of historical, anthropological, and legal research have demonstrated that the ontological status of the foetus is not only extremely complex, it is also charged with a powerful potential that impacts the way society deals with it. I explore the strange space that the foetus occupies in the social imaginary and the tensions existing between its legal status and social practices around dead foetuses. By looking at the limits of what the law is able to frame, it is possible to bring forth the ambivalence inhering in foetal status and the attempts at harnessing it into certainty through formal practices, such as funeral arrangements.

Aimee Middlemiss
'Beyond Obstetric Violence: The Medical Care of Women Experiencing Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss as Ontological Boundary Work'

The recent development of the concept of obstetric violence offers a way of connecting the structural devaluing of women’s reproductive work with the individual acts of medical caregivers (Sadler et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2018). In this talk, I argue that bringing obstetric violence alongside teleological biomedical concepts of the foetus (Franklin, 1991, 2014) and of reproduction (Thompson, 2005) in the context of ontological politics (Mol, 1999) can give greater insight into the causation of violence in obstetric settings. In second trimester pregnancy loss, medical care crosses into obstetric violence when it is also performing ontological boundary work about the nature of the foetal being and pregnancy itself.