Forgotten specimens

Sunday, 22 January, was the anniversary of one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in US history. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established the legality of abortion in the United States by arguing that a woman's right to privacy extends to what is inside her body.

Republicans have been trying to have the decision overturned ever since — through organized protests, by making abortion a topic in every presidential campaign, and by naming Catholic judges to the Supreme Court. In November 2011, Mississippi held a referendum on a proposal to change the state constitution to declare a human foetus a person. Had the referendum passed, not only abortion but also certain forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization would now be considered legally equivalent to murder.

Anthropology Professor Lynn Morgan of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts says that the current American preoccupation with foetuses is a recent phenomenon; until the 1960s, human embryos "were regarded as undifferentiated biological specimens; they certainly didn't represent people or even potential people." It was common for biological laboratories in high schools, colleges and hospitals to have specimens for study.

Morgan, who studies social and cultural norms, was surprised to find out in 2003 that her college had a collection of 100 embryos and foetuses in its basement — a few of which are seen in our photo. Morgan looked for references to ethical questions that may have been asked in the past, but didn't find any. "No one ever even gave it a thought," she says. "As far as they were concerned, these were objects of nature. We now think of them as objects of culture; we now think of them as being part of us."

Morgan's research on this subject led her to write a 2009 book, Icons of Life: A Cultural History of Human Embryos.

"Some people equate embryos and foetuses as inevitable human beings, and that's just not reality," says Morgan. "The biological reality is that between 30 and 50 per cent of fertilized embryos die, often before women even know they are pregnant. The survival rate of fertilized embryos is not that high."

Read more about Professor Morgan's work.