In Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance, Carole Stablie opens with a tale of how in 1991, backwards politics and morality were able to given the New Right the ability to undermine a woman's basic right to controlling her own body. With the Supreme Court reinforcing "the dominant political and ideological currents characterized by the conservative restoration" women were no longer allowed to seek an abortion for an unwanted pregnancy, even if the pregnancy posed a serious health risk to the woman's life. Stabile states that the primary function of her essay is to examine how ideology has made it possible for the New Right to ignorantly amalgamate the concepts of "fetus" and "life" to erase all traces of "woman" in a pregnancy. As Stabile points out, the female body is turned into nothing more than slowly expanding vessel that uniquely loses its rights and importance as the baby gestates. Stabile makes this claim, through the invention of fetal photography�the mapping of the fetus' life cycle.
The essay delves into a critique concerning how the media (namely a 1965 Life magazine spread that showcased, for the first time, pictures of an 18 week old fetus) and visual technologies have paved the way for the erasure of the woman's body in the depiction of pregnancy. As Stabile states, "Representations of 'fetal parenthood' depend upon the erasure of female bodies and the reduction of women to passive, reproductive machines". As noted, in a unique twist, the female body is represented as merely a space in which the fetus occupies, and that in all fetal photography, lengthy strides have been made to explicitly remove all forms of symbiosis between a woman and her child.
In a rather morbid twist, Life magazine actually photographed pictures of autopsied fetuses to compile their spread on pre-natal life. By doing this, Life magazine physically and literally removed all traces of the mother and the woman's body from pregnancy and birth. The placenta was peeled away, the amniotic sac is removed, the fetus itself undergoes a color treatment. This move successfully castrates the woman from the fetus, revealing the non-existent, yet perceived, autonomous divide between the two.
Instead, Stabile urges us to consider pregnancy to be parasitic�that a fetus is more lecherous and feeds off the mother's body. To counter this notion, descriptions of the womb were no longer depicted as a safe haven where a fetus stews in the fluids of life, but rather, a traumatic warzone in which a fetus must outsmart if it wishes to outlast. By creating the image of a helpless baby struggling inside the womb, the New Right has made it increasingly easy to enforce the Biblical ideology that all life is sacred and abortion is an abomination. Stabile cleverly compares this battle for life as a modern day Civil War; that pro life and pro choice now divide a nation.
As well, Stabile comments on how due to the technological advancements in the ability to photography the fetus, the medicalization of pregnancy has also allowed for the complete removal of the woman from her own pregnancy. Doctors now have the ability to examine and diagnose a pregnancy without any feedback from the woman who is undergoing the pregnancy. Once again, the woman is erased and all that remains is the content of her swollen belly. In the same regard, Stabile comments on how even though the media has successfully removed pregnancy from a woman, a pregnant woman is still viewed as a deviant. The infamous Demi Moore cover of Vanity Fair sparked an outrage, not so much because of the nudity, but because Vanity Fair was showcasing sexual difference�that "the pregnant body� is a source of abjection and disgust in popular culture�awkward, uncomfortable and grotesquely excessive". In our culture, a shocking emphasis is placed on svelte, desirable thinness. How pregnancy should be addressed in the media today is a question that is thankfully, the only question left unexplored.
