‘The alien baby’: Risk, blame and prenatal indeterminacy

Abstract

The author uses the narrative of a mother, whose baby's Down Syndrome diagnosis was only ascertained days after his birth, to shed light upon the epistemological and social foundations of risk-medicine. This is a practice which, by seeking prediction through the working of probabilities, brings to the fore principles of uncertainty, indeterminacy, and ambiguity. The paper further portrays the salience of practices of indignation and blame, as discussed in the context of ‘risk’, in the fields of pregnancy and childbirth. In Israel, a society where the presence or absence of congenital abnormalities stands as a major axis upon which a newborn's identity is defined, this ‘high risk’ baby remains in a liminal, between and betwixt state for which the mother is blamed, not so much for not having terminated the pregnancy, as for not having gone through diagnostic tests which would have settled this ambiguous state and allowed the involvement and control of risk-medicine practices. This analysis uncovers an understudied aspect of ‘risk’, namely its epistemological bases.

Keywords:

• uncertainty
• risk
• diagnostic test
• screening
• Down Syndrome
• disability