Staging Embryos

Abstract

The founding of the Carnegie Institute’s Department of Embryology in 1913, alongside its systematization of embryo staging, contributed to the mechanization of developmental stages of embryo growth in the early 20th century. For a brief period in the middle of the century, attention to the detailed interrelation between embryo development and time made pre-existing ideas about pregnancy ends less determinative of ideas about that developmental course. However, the turn to the genetic scale led to the disappearance of this attention, replaced by a sense of biological life as seamlessly scripted. This study examines the history of what I refer to as temporal attention: attention to the live, unfolding potentialities within vital matter. The reintroduction of temporal attention to discussions of development allows us to more fully consider non-human vitality and the experiences of beings that house or otherwise intimately intersect with that vital tissue, regardless of outcomes.

Six Days in Plastic: Potentiality, Normalization, and In Vitro Embryos in the Postgenomic Age

“…But in vitro embryos are as yet womb-less, nurtured in climate-controlled incubators, metabolizing culture medium, and stressed by the penetration of pipettes siphoning a cell or two. Taking an embryological perspective (DiCaglio 2017), whereby a fetus-baby pathway (nor a “healthy” one) is not anticipated, could offer ripe and rich theorizing for feminist technoscience and disability scholars.…”

“…Mansfield (2017) describes this as a “folded futurity,” the enfolding of future and past into the figure of the vulnerable fetus. But, to echo DiCaglio (2017), paying attention to the temporal frames that bring embryos and fetuses into view can alert us to how those various fixings (six days in plastic, 1,000 days of life, embryo stages) that do not encapsulate the lively, sensorial, attentiveness of bodies (Frost 2020) that are untethered to futurity. Epigenetics may trace to certain exposures, but there is no prior to or return to so-called health or a norm.…”

“…There are many enumerations throughout the IVF treatment, but most reiterated was that, for IVF to work, “you just need one .” One refers to one embryo with the potential to be the sought-after, viable, and healthy child—an anticipatory logic that views embryos “through the lens of the already-human, its future always mapped out before it” (DiCaglio 2017, 19). Here, I describe the “genetic mode” of embryo potentiality in the screening and selection for “the one.” Firstly, this mode attributes embryo potential to its genetic components, linking viability with genetic normality.…”

“…Screening out aneuploidy embryos was framed to prevent miscarriages, which are viewed as “anomalies, misfires on the development path, failures and oddities” (DiCaglio 2017, 4), and thus shortening time from IVF to pregnancy and averting unnecessary grief. That is, PGS was articulated in its usefulness to ensure the increased effectiveness of IVF and producing a live birth, and one more quickly, while simultaneously backgrounding its role in producing the right kind of birth (although it decidedly does this as well).…”

Bonding work: Spacing relations through pregnancy apps

“…They are also carefully curated to produce a particular narrative of foetal development and growth, starting with fertilisation, through the embryonic and foetal periods, and culminating in childbirth, which the user is invited to navigate along a timeline of progress. The ordering of embryos and foetuses according to how they grow over time produces a cohesive trajectory of standard human prenatal development that is rooted in embryological science (Fannin, 2018;Hopwood, 2000;Stratford, 2015); these visual narratives constitute growth as universal and thus intensify a hope for "normal development" (DiCaglio, 2017).…”