Abstract

This article provides a cultural history of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) from its naming in 1973 until the 1990s, when it began to be cited in appeals from death-row inmates. It argues that FAS was demedicalized as physicians gradually lost the cultural authority to frame its public meaning. Under the leadership of government officials and legal professionals, and in response to growing public mistrust of the medicalization of deviance, FAS came to be understood not as a cluster of precisely delineated symptoms, but as a social deformity that expressed the moral failings of mothers and marked their children as politically marginal and potentially dangerous. Critical to this reframing of FAS was its identification with a racial minority--Native Americans--its interpretation as an expression of maternal/fetal conflict, and its economic and social costs. In charting the demedicalization of FAS popular portrayals of the syndrome as well as professional literatures are examined.

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