Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos (review)

Imagine a United States in which abortion was not contested. Women accessed it easily, and public and private insurance paid for it. Women who had abortions, and doctors who performed them, were understood to be moral and respectable, not tainted. Elections, health care reform legislation, and Supreme Court nominee hearings were not held hostage by the issue. Difficult as this is to imagine, Lynn Morgan’s wonderful account of the history of embryo collecting in the United States begins to create space for this possibility. The intractable U.S. debate rests on an understanding of the pre-born as autonomous and precious, deserving of respect and state protection. Morgan’s account unravels this idea. It has not always been this way, she argues. To prove her case, she traces the history of the once-common early-twentieth-century practice of embryo collection, led by embryologist Franklin Paine Mall.

Mall was trained as a physician, but spent his life as a researcher. After graduating from University of Michigan Medical School in 1883, he went on to study in Germany with renowned embryologist Wilhelm His. He returned to the United States inspired to further advance the new discipline of embryology, the last frontier of human anatomy. Mall took a position at Johns Hopkins University, and ultimately built an elaborate network of physicians who sent him embryo specimens of all gestational ages from miscarriages, hysterectomies, and autopsies. By 1944 nearly 10,000 specimens sat in his collection. By slicing, dicing, and modeling them, Mall and his team provided new understanding of anatomic development before birth.

However, as embryos became anatomical specimens, women were forgotten. The circumstances of their pregnancies and pregnancy losses were erased. In achieving “specimen-hood” embryo social context was obliterated. In other words, fetal autonomy—a prerequisite for the assertion that unborn humans have a life, rights, and interests separate from those of the pregnant women—was invented by embryo collectors. Morgan notes that this is a correction to a large body of feminist writing that argues that more recent technological advances—ultrasound, fetal surgery, and in vitro fertilization—are responsible for this separation.

In Morgan’s account, the embryo is a product of two kinds of social negotiations, primarily: the social circumstances of women (including patriarchy) that led to pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or abortion; and the far-flung social networks and elaborate collection protocols that led to acquisition of Mall’s specimens in the first place. Embryos may appear to have autonomy, especially when represented in photographs and diagrams as disembodied, free-floating entities; but this understanding renders myriad social negotiations invisible, collapsing them into an illusory idea of the “natural,” scientific embryo.

It is not simply the case that social negotiations produced the embryo. Morgan shows a reciprocal relationship between things social and scientific. The embryo grew out of social relationships, but in turn it became an actor in our cultural dramas. Morgan’s research is a case study in Latourian vicious cycles: culture produces a scientific work object, and that object becomes a subject—an actor—in subsequent social dramas, reinforcing the cultural narratives that produced it in the first place. Social negotiations produced the autonomous embryo, but that embryo in turn sparked professional battles between Mall and his colleagues over their custody; they shaped Maryland birth and death certificate law, and more recently played roles in advertising (Volvo ads), entertainment (Mohawk Productions’ giggling fetus), and of course, abortion law, policy, and propaganda. Disembodied embryos are “recruited” to speak about social issues of the day. As Morgan summarizes, “The embryological view of development . . . made possible the politics that drives the science, and the science that drives the politics” (20).

I appreciated Morgan’s lively writing as well as her many moments of humor. And it was indeed lovely to have Morgan the anthropologist, “do” history, because expert documentation of social relationships and meanings of culturally...