A vivid and compelling portrait of life and death, love and loss, anguished choices, and multiple meanings on a shifting frontier of reproductive medicine, Looking Within situates the wondrous and troubling technology of fetoscopy firmly within a social context. At once informative, critical, and deeply empathetic, this book demands that any assessment of the promises and the dangers of this technology be informed by insights from women's lives.
Janelle S. Taylor, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington
Blizzard's sensitive and fascinating ethnography explains the risks and rewards of fetoscopy in riveting and sometimes heartbreaking detail. Her obvious respect and affection for the clinicians, women, and families who undergo this little-known procedure mark Looking Within as a welcome addition to the burgeoning scholarship on reproductive imaging technologies and fetal politics in the clinic.
Lynn M. Morgan, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Mount Holyoke College
Looking Within presents a deft analysis of fetoscopy, an emergent technology hyped as the salvation of 'miracle babies' which is actually an attempt to save dying fetuses. Through her beautifully written and thoughtful ethnography of the emergencies that bring pregnant women and their supporters to one US hospital, Blizzard reveals the deep emotional and expert technical work that ground this controversial intervention. Blizzard conveys both the gravity and hope through which health care providers, researchers, and potential parents all enter the operating theater, and cope with its consequences. This is an excellent contribution to science and technology studies as well as to the anthropology of reproduction.
Rayna Rapp, Department of Anthropology, New York University
In this most visual of eras, what bioethical issues are at play when doctors 'scope' the fetus? In what is the first comprehensive study of fetoscopy, Deborah Blizzard's ethnography gives a stimulating look at the many meanings of this transgressive and transformative medical technology.
Susan Squier, author, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine
This book is insightful, compelling, analytically rigorous, and politically relevant. It forms a complex, rich portrait of fetal medical technologies in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. Looking Within will be a major contribution to feminist studies of reproduction, medical sociology, medical anthropology, bioethics, history of medicine, and science, technology, and society studies. It also will be relevant to a popular audience interested in women's health, reproduction, and medical technologies.
Monica J. Casper, Department of Sociology, Vanderbilt University
