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Foetal personhood and representations of the absent child in pregnancy loss memorialization

Australian National University, Helen.keane{at}anu.edu.au

Because mourning and memorializing a miscarriage seems to imply acceptance of foetal personhood, feminists have been reluctant to address the often traumatic but common experience of pregnancy loss. Feminist anthropologists of reproduction have argued that adopting a view of personhood as constructed and negotiated, rather than inherent, solves this dilemma and enables the development of a feminist discourse of pregnancy loss. This article aims to make a critical contribution to such a discourse by analysing representations of lost babies and children in online pregnancy loss memorials. It focuses on two genres of representation, idealized angels and medical ultrasound images. It argues that the dominance of a biological model of personhood limits the ability of both forms of representation to secure the status of memorialized children as real. However, pregnancy loss memorials do communicate the anguish of grieving parents, in part through the very unrepresentability of their loss. They also provoke a questioning of the taken for granted subject of `the child', whether imagined or real, absent or present.

Key Words: child • foetal personhood • memorialization • pregnancy loss • representation

Feminist Theory, Vol. 10, No. 2, 153-171 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/1464700109104922


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