In Karen Barad's agential realism, the "fetus" does not preexist as an object with a distinct agency that interacts with the "mother." Meanwhile, recent scientific studies reveal the vital roles symbiotic bacteria play in human reproduction. Drawing on material feminist theory, this article offers an alternative ontology of the pregnant body represented by the motherfetus, which collapses the material distinction between the "maternal" and the "fetal" embedded in the Cartesian mother/fetus dualism regularly reiterated by scientific, popular, and feminist discourses. The article deconstructs pregnancy, which is typically known as a bidirectional exchange of substances between the parent and offspring, and reconstitutes it into a symbiotic process sustained by networks of commensal microbacterial activities. The idea of holobiont reproduction challenges some of the basic concepts associated with pregnancy and childbirth such as the difference between a fetus and an infant and the gender of the gestational parent. This article offers the motherfetus-holobiont as a boundary-breaching cyborg figure that opens up new possibilities for scientific and feminist studies of the pregnant body. Takeshita

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The biography of a multifaceted technological object, the IUD, illuminates how political contexts shaped contraceptive development, marketing, use, and users. The intrauterine device (IUD) is used by 150 million women around the world. It is the second most prevalent method of female fertility control in the global South and the third most prevalent in the global North. Over its five decades of use, the IUD has been viewed both as a means for women's reproductive autonomy and as coercive tool of state-imposed population control, as a convenient form of birth control on a par with the pill and as a threat to women's health. In this book, Chikako Takeshita investigates the development, marketing, and use of the IUD since the 1960s. She offers a biography of a multifaceted technological object through a feminist science studies lens, tracing the transformations of the scientific discourse around it over time and across different geographies. Takeshita describes how developers of the IUD adapted to different social interests in their research and how changing assumptions about race, class, and female sexuality often guided scientific inquiries. The IUD, she argues, became a “politically versatile technology,” adaptable to both feminist and nonfeminist reproductive politics because of researchers' attempts to maintain the device's suitability for women in both the developing and the developed world. Takeshita traces the evolution of scientists' concerns—from contraceptive efficacy and product safety to the politics of abortion—and describes the most recent, hormone-releasing, menstruation-suppressing iteration of the IUD. Examining fifty years of IUD development and use, Takeshita finds a microcosm of the global political economy of women's bodies, health, and sexuality in the history of this contraceptive device.

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Feminist media studies scholars concur that representations of childbirth in popular media normalize medical domination of maternity care and women's subordination to it. This article aims to fill the gap in the dearth of academic analysis of alternative representations of childbearing by examining the documentary film The Business of Being Born and the BBC TV drama series Call the Midwife. Although they are situated in disparate socio-historical contexts, both productions push against medicalization and present positive images of "natural" childbirth. Business systematically critiques medicalization of birth in the U.S. and presents midwifery-assisted homebirth as the solution. Call counters the dogma of necessary medical attention during childbirth by showing how midwifery dominated during the mid-twentieth century in a London neighborhood. Call also portrays midwives and a physician collaboratively providing maternal care in an impoverished neighborhood. Reviewed together, Business and Call augment each other as the former reveals the contemporary struggles and solutions devised to de-medicalize birth and the latter serves as an example of how homebirths may be supported by medico-midwifery collaboration in an urban community.