Abstractpregnant body are virtually absent throughout the series. Second, visual depictions of women's full bodies adhere to a race-based hierarchy of presentation. Finally, the fundamental discourse about pregnant and female bodies communicated to physicians (primarily) by these images is one of pathology and fragmentation. We conclude that the resulting social and medical construction of the pregnant and female body presented in the Williams series is one of disembodiment, abjection, and ultimately marginality. These findings support recent feminist research that criticizes both the increasing erasure of the person of the women from the medical interpretation of pregnancy and the concomitant decrease in women's perceived sense of empowerment as pregnant beings.

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Recent genetic accounts of human variation treat the biological components of socially constructed racial groupings as differences in the frequencies of some genetic elements among geographically dispersed populations. This perspective provides a de-essentialized account of human biological diversity that should shift the stasis of the debates about affirmative action away from questions about innate human abilities and toward value issues.

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Civic trailblazing comes more easily to some than to others.