Conceiving Parenthood

Book

Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction by Amy Laura Hall. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

Reviewer

Valerie Weaver-Zercher, writer and editor, Mechanicsburg, PA

Churchly discussions of reproductive bioethics usually take place in the third person. The major actors – those advocating for so-called “designer babies” or for prenatal testing designed to enable selective termination of pregnancies – remain distinct from us, the narrators, who can respond from a distance and with disgust. Such conversations also usually occur in the future tense, in anticipation of a brave new world in which parents shop for their unborn child’s hair color, IQ, and personality type.

Yet for readers with any connection to middle-class, mainline Protestantism, Christian ethicist Amy Laura Hall’s new book requires a shift from third person to first and from future tense to past. Her study requires readers to ask not “What will they come up with next?” but “How have we contributed to the ethos that has engendered such technologies?”

Hall’s wide-ranging survey of 20th-century Protestant ideas about family, social status, and scientific innovation suggests that the seeds of troubling technologies were sown closer to our ecclesial home than many Christians like to admit. As she writes, “a tradition that had within it the possibility of leveling all believers as orphaned and gratuitously adopted kin came instead to baptize a culture of carefully delineated, racially encoded domesticity” (10).

By uncritically blessing both scientific advancement and an idealized portrait of the nuclear family, Hall claims, 20th-century Protestantism set the stage for technologies that would enable aspiring American parents to engineer the perfect child.

The “germ-free home” stands at the center of Hall’s first chapter, which mines mid-century issues of Parents’ magazine and its Methodist cognate, Together. The war on germs, made possible by products like Lysol, sedimented racial and class differences between the “hygienic” families of the assumed readers and other people’s children.

Hall’s second chapter looks at how the marketing of infant formula and baby food encouraged parents to shift their trust from informally and familially transmitted know-how to dictates of the medical establishment. This chapter’s examination of the bizarre “Baby-Incubators—With Living Babies!” exhibit at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933-34, which allowed visitors to view premature infants struggling for survival inside oven-like incubators, drives home the point that Americans were beginning to employ a technological gaze to a macabre extent.

Hall turns in the third chapter to the eugenics movement in the United States, which was endorsed by many progressive Protestants. She counters the prevailing idea that the American movement withered as the horrors of Nazi-era eugenics became public knowledge. Instead, she suggests, “there are links between current hopes for genius and past attempts to vaccinate the social body against the menace of poverty, disability, and deviance” (217).

Hall’s final chapter moves into current bioethical debates by tracing connections between the promises of the atomic age and the claims of the current genomic revolution.

The narrative throughout Conceiving Parenthood is provocative and thorough. The book teems with illustrations and advertisements from magazines from the last century and this one, and all are accompanied by painstakingly close readings.

At times, however, the contour of Hall’s argument buckles under the weight of the evidence she presents; she seems unwilling to weigh, rank, and especially discard data that distracts from the trajectory of her main point. Unfortunately, chapters averaging 100 pages each will likely intimidate some readers who otherwise would benefit from her analysis.

The author’s voice alternates between the scholarly, the pastoral, and the autobiographical. Sometimes the shift can be jarring, although none of the voices by itself would have been up to the great task Hall sets for herself.

Calling herself a pro-life feminist, Hall moves beyond historical investigation and critical analysis to pastoral and prophetic challenge. “I do indeed target for moral interrogation women like myself,” she writes, “for our complicity in the narrations that render other women’s wombs as prodigal” (400).

Hall takes her call to action beyond protesting the eugenic whiff of some modern reproductive technologies and questioning the “meticulously planned procreation” of the elite classes. She suggests a much broader program of compassionate valuing of those who, for whatever reason, are deemed outside the realm of “normal.”

Anabaptist readers will find much resonance with this book, especially with its call to resist market-driven definitions of what – and who – constitutes a productive life.

The challenge for Christian parents today, Hall says, is “to see the children in their homes, neighborhoods, and churches as unqualified gifts rather than projects, to identify ‘downward’ rather than to climb, and to allow their strategically protected and planned lives to become entangled in the needs of families and children judged to be at risk and behind the curve” (250).