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，将先进的医疗技术作为一种文化实践来考察。在新生儿重症监护中，将婴儿死亡率降至最低的尖端技术尝试面临着医学伦理使高科技医疗实践重新人性化的关键尝试。该项目侧重于在这方面出现的悖论：以高发病率和残障为代价挽救生命，护理人员感到他们对自己的医疗实践几乎没有控制，却迫切要求进行积极的医疗治疗，医学道德参与了它声称反对的同样的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。通过考察该领域起源于法国的历史和当前新生儿实践，以及它们在美国的采用和修改，这项研究将确定和分析对理解新生儿学和新生儿医学伦理至关重要的技术需求在当前社会进程中的出现，作为赋予机器自主权的人类生殖再创造的参与者，隐藏早产的社会生产，并肯定人类生命的仪式价值。这笔赠款支持在法国和美国开展档案、纪录片和民族志实地研究所需的旅行、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.