Time, Place and Settings: Negotiating Birth, Childhood and Death

Abstract

This chapter examines, through three case studies, how new health technologies are changing the material and social conditions of critical moments of life’s transition: birth, childhood development and the end of life. New and emerging health technologies are surrounded by ambivalence and risk: they promise a greater degree of ‘human’ agency over the bodily processes of birth, childhood illness and death (by enabling ‘discrete’ surveillance, maintenance of function or increased comfort), but at the same time may be perceived to take on ‘a life of their own’, placing new constraints around those affected by them (Beck, 1992). These new constraints have essentially social consequences and thus stand in a relationship of perpetual tension with the individual and bodily orientation of the particular health technologies at hand. This tension is, in part, related to the symbolic significance of birth, childhood and death within our culture: a significance which extends far beyond the sum of the material and physical transformations wrought by them (Eder, 1996). Culturally, we tend to place value on representations of birth, childhood or death that can be represented as untrammelled by medical technology: we set great store by ‘natural’ birth and death, unfettered childhood and the location of the healthy child within a well functioning and relationship-centred family.

These are the shifting sands we have created for ourselves in late modernity as a result of our intrusions into the ‘natural’ world.

(Lock, 2001: 191)