Sacralising the Foetus: The Birth of the Unborn Person in the Anglophone World

<strong>Centre for the Study of Social Systems School of Social Sciences </strong> CSSS Colloquium <strong>Prof. Harish Naraindas </strong> (Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU) a talk on <strong>Sacralising the Foetus: The Birth of the Unborn Person in the Anglophone World</strong> Date : <strong>February 4, 2016 </strong> <strong>Abstract: </strong>This paper begins within ethnography of a perinatal disposal in a funeral parlour in an Australian metropolis. It delineates in some detail the preparing and viewing of the foetus/child and then the eulogy by a special perinatal funeral director who acts as the celebrant. It subsequently traces, through the voice of the celebrant, a pioneer in perinatal bereavement in Australia, the general form and evolution of perinatal bereavement and examines how the deceasedperinate went from being hospital waste to a sacralised subject, and from being a dead foetus to an 'unborn child' with funerary rights. It then proceeds to situate this seemingly Australian story within a larger Anglo-American canvas by moving between the American mid-west and the United Kingdom. It will examine, through three university teaching hospitals in the US, Scotland and England, institutions such as midwifery and the chaplaincy, which through secular and religious ritual prepare the 'unborn child' on its disposal journey. It is through the material, linguistic and symbolic practices of midwives, chaplains and funeral directors (and others including bereaved parents) that the contemporary perinate in the Anglo-American world becomes the person par excellence, unlike in India where it is marked by silence, or continues to be treated as hospital waste. This sacralising of the Anglo-American foetus has resulted in the 'unborn child' to be the only 'person 'in American history to have unconditional and universal health care; the WHO to mandate a proper disposal if it is of 22 weeks gestation or 500 grams; and has led some Church of England priests to baptise it, resulting in the theologically interesting move of offering sacraments for the dead. <strong>Bio-Data:</strong> Harish Naraindas is Professor at the school of social sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and adjunct associate professor at the University of Iowa. His research interests are in the sociology of science and medicine and have spanned a number of objects of enquiry: the emergence of tropical medicine as a discipline, the history of smallpox, a cross-cultural study of childbirth, medical tourism, alternative medicine, the European spa, disaster and risk. His most recent publications are two co-edited books: Healing Holidays: Itinerant Patients, Therapeutic Locales and the Quest for Health, London: Routledge 2015;and Asymmetrical Conversations: Contestations, Circumventions and the Blurring of Therapeutic Boundaries, New York: Berghahn, 2014. He is currently working on past-life aetiologies and therapeutic trance in German psychosomatic medicine, and on a cross-cultural study of perinatal death, personhood, and modes of memorialising perinatal loss.