Dissertation Research: An Inquiry into Neonatology, Medical Ethics, and Technology

本论文的研究将通过对当代美国社会新生儿重症监护的分析来检验先进的医疗技术作为一种文化实践。在新生儿重症监护中，试图将婴儿死亡率降到最低的复杂技术与医学伦理学重新人性化高科技医疗实践的关键尝试相冲突。该项目侧重于在这种情况下产生的悖论：以高发病率和残疾为代价拯救生命，护理人员感到他们对自己的医疗实践几乎没有控制权，但迫切需要积极的医疗治疗，医学伦理学参与其声称反对的同样非人性化的抽象关系，以及医疗实践质疑其所依赖的技术的影响。通过研究法国的历史和当前的新生儿实践，该领域的根源，以及它们在美国的采用和修改，该研究将确定和分析当前社会进程中理解新生儿学和新生儿医学伦理的技术必要性的出现，作为人类生殖重塑的参与者，以一种赋予机器自主权的形式，隐藏了早产的社会生产，肯定了人类生命的仪式价值。这笔赠款用于在法国和美国进行档案、文献和人种学实地研究所需的旅费、材料和设备。

This dissertation research will examine advanced medical technology as a cultural practice through an analysis of intensive care for newborns in contemporary American society. In neonatal intensive care, sophisticated technological attempts to minimize infant mortality confront medical ethics' critical attempts to rehumanize high-tech medical practice. The project focuses on paradoxes arising in this context: saving lives at the cost of high degrees of morbidity and handicap, caregivers' feeling that they have little control over their medical practice but pressing for aggressive medical treatment, the participation of medical ethics in the same dehumanizing relations of abstraction that it claims to oppose, and of medical practice in questioning the implications of the technologies on which it depends. Through examining historical and current neonatal practices in France, where the field has its roots, and their adoption and modification in the United States, the study will identify and analyze the appearance of a technological imperative central to understanding neonatology and neonatal medical ethics in current social processes, as participants in a reinvention of human reproduction in a form that grants autonomy to machines, hides the social production of prematurity, and affirms the ritual value of human life. This grant supports travel, material and equipment needed to undertake archival, documentary and ethnographic field research in France and the United States.