In the basement of Mount Holyoke, a private women’s college in western Massachusetts, there is one such collection of human fetuses that was amassed between 1920 and 1950, “an era when abortion and contraception were illegal, when sex education at many women’s colleges was restricted to a single well-attended lecture delivered to graduating seniors.”[ii] Mount Holyoke’s collection seems to have not really been a collection at all, but the end point of many fetuses that were donated to the university by alumni.
This “curio cabinet”[iii] phase of biology was spurred by a major project headed by the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C. which sought to document and describe human development from fertilization through the first eight weeks of gestation. The project utilized zoologists, anatmologists, embiologists, technicians, and scones of physicians in the northeast of the United States whom mostly retrieved fetal bodies from miscarriages or autopsies. The project put thousands of fetuses into circulation through out the country for the purpose of research.[iv]
The first few years of the Carnegie project were wrought with frustration for researchers were unable to describe the first few weeks of gestation.
“Human ova in the first 15-20 days were so scarce [around 1933-34] that isolated examples found in the surgical pathology laboratory were prized, were worth their weight in gold, and named after the person who found them.”[v] In collaboration with the Carnegie Institute, Boston physicians John Rock and Arthur Tremain Hertig headed their own study of embryos and fetuses in the late 1930’s. Their study was designed for maximizing their chances of finding fertilized ova following the “elective” removal of the participant’s uterus at the Boston Free Hospital for Women. Qualified participants were married and living with their husbands, intelligent, less than 40 years of age, previously had at least three full-term pregnancies, and willing to record their menstrual cycles, as well as any incidences of unprotected intercourse. During the two week period between ovulation and menstruation the participants would be scheduled for their voluntarily hysterectomy.[vi] Rock and Hertig collected specimens from nearly every day of first three weeks of gestation. Talk circulated of awarding them a Nobel Prize.[vii]
Before his death in 1990, Hertig seemed to acknowledge that if his and Rock’s study were to be conducted toady that it would be more sensitive, due to the political-scape surrounding contemporary issues of abortion.
“Yet he admittedly denies that he and Rock were performing abortions (or even the moral equivalent of abortions) on their patients. Rock himself was a devout Catholic deeply engaged in debating the Catholic Church over the morality of contraception…Clearly, the fertilized ovum was not regarded as a morally significant entity at the time of their study.”[viii] Hertig is quoted as saying, “Induced abortions were illegal in Massachusetts and the Free Hospital for Women was not running an abortion clinic; however, we and others were vitally interested in early human development.”[ix] The research conducted by Hertig and Rock, their findings, and the imagery associated with the first days of gestation are now part of standard reproductive knowledge.
Only because the fetal body has come to symbolize far more that a mass of developing tissue today does it strike us as odd that at one point, they may have been housed in jars for the purposes of science.[x] While the body will remain a part of nature, how culture interprets it will be “…reinforced [by] principals and values specific to the time and place” of an individual.[xi]
The image of the developing fetus facilitated by the research of Hertig, Rock and Carnegie Institute has infiltrated our social consciousness and inspired many works of art. Many works can be admired for their simple esthetic appeal, 
some draw on our current cultural notion that the housing of fetal bodies in jars as an act reserved for the laboratory of a “mad scientist”, 
others seek to take more of a shocking stance. With the aid of “fabricators” or sperm donors, Yale University undergraduate Aliza Shvarts continually impregnated herself and then systematically aborted her pregnancies by taking legal herbal supplements for her senior art showing.
The main component of her art installation was a white cube suspended from the ceiling, wrapped in layers of plastic wrap that contained blood and tissue from her miscarriages. On to the cube and the surrounding walls she projected video footage of herself miscarrying in a bathtub.[xii] The goal in creating the exhibit, Shvarts says, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. A statement give by an official at Yale on the issue is as follows:
Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today [April 17, 2008], including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman's body. She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art. Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.[xiii]
While the scientific imagery of the fetus continues to shape cultural interpretations of body, the inverse can be said as well; culturally constricted notions of the body and gender are overlaid on to scientific findings. In Emily Martin’s The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles, the use of language pertaining to sperm and egg interaction is explored.
Using quotations from an article that appeared in Medical World, the egg is painted to be seen as docile, awaiting to be rescued by a valiant sperm: “a dominate bride awaiting her mate’s magic kiss, which instills the spirit that brings her to life.” Contrasting the eggs image as a maid in waiting, sperm powerfully “mover through the female genital tract in quest of the ovum.”[xiv] Conjuring the male-female relationship as allegory in describing the world around us is certainly not limited to the sperm and the egg. Often time any object that takes an active role in penetrating a helpless recipient is typically described as male and female: the lock and key or the plug and the socket are just two examples.
The imagery produced by science and the verbiage that is used to describe those images can never be divorced from the cultural systems facilitating them. In the case of art, the extent to which an artist provocates the images of science is of varying scale, yet none the less, science and culture are intricately linked when it comes to individuals reporting findings or expressing opinions.
What other examples can be applied to this notion that cultural views impact scientific views?
[i] Lynn M. Morgan, “Materializing the Fetal Body, Or, What are Those Corpses Doing in Biology’s Basement?” in Fetal Subjects, Feminists Positions, ed. Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith W. Michaels. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) 43-59.
[ii] Morgan, 44.
[iii] Morgan, 48.
[iv] Morgan, 47.
[v] Morgan, 50.
[vi] Morgan, 51.
[vii] Morgan, 52.
[viii] Morgan, 52.
[ix] Morgan, 52.
[x] Morgan, 55.
[xi] Morgan, 57.
[xii] Martine Powers, “For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse,” Yale Daily News (April 17, 2008), http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24513.
[xiii] American Digest, Aliza Shvarts: Abortion Goo Girl Rants Against the “Patriarchal Heteronomative,” http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/bad_americans/abortion_goo_gi.php (Accessed July 3, 2009).
[xiv] Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Signs16, No. 3 (1991): 490.
Images cited:
http://www.advancedimagingconcepts.com/images/fetal.jpg&imgrefurl
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~dalbino/images13/Clapp17f.jpeg&imgrefurl
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/science/images/bieggsperm2.jpg&imgrefurl
http://www.donkeytipping.com/files/abortion_march.jpg
http://members.bigvalley.net/fpc/develop1.jpg&imgrefurl
http://www.planetmagazine.com/pm24/fetus.jpg&imgrefurl
http://www.bjwinslow.com/gallery/fetus?page=2
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/files/2008/04/aliza.jpg&imgrefurl
http://www.cartoonstock.com/newscartoons/cartoonists/jlv/lowres/jlvn1605l.jpg
http://www.halloweenadventure.com/catalog/plug--socket-plus-couples-costume-set-funny-halloween-costume-in-size-plus.htm
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