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

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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.