Constructing amniocentesis: Maternal and medical discourses

The language of biomedical science is powerful. Its neutralizing vocabulary, explanatory syntax, and distancing pragmatics provide universal descriptions of human bodies and their life processes that appear to be pre-cultural or noncultural. But as the field of medical anthropology constantly reminds us, bodies are also and always culturally constituted, and their aches, activities, and accom- plishments are continuously assigned meanings. W hile the discourse of biomedi- cine speaks of the inevitable march of scientific and clinical progress, its practices are constantly open to interpretation. Its hegemonic definitions routinely require acceptance, transformation, or contestation from the embodied “objects�? whose subjectivity it so powerfully affects.