In the twenty-first century, people's possibilities to choose the children that they want to enter this world have expanded dramatically. Across the globe, new reproductive technologies enable expectant parents to select certain children-to-be for life, rejecting others before they are born. Based on fieldwork conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam, Haunting Images explores how parents-to-be handle the demanding decisions that selective reproductive technologies confront them with. Addressing questions of individuality and collectivity, responsibility and choice, the book offers a groundbreaking ethnogra ... More

In the twenty-first century, people's possibilities to choose the children that they want to enter this world have expanded dramatically. Across the globe, new reproductive technologies enable expectant parents to select certain children-to-be for life, rejecting others before they are born. Based on fieldwork conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam, Haunting Images explores how parents-to-be handle the demanding decisions that selective reproductive technologies confront them with. Addressing questions of individuality and collectivity, responsibility and choice, the book offers a groundbreaking ethnography of selective reproduction in an Asian setting. At its center are thirty pregnant women living in Hanoi whose fetuses were labeled abnormal at an ultrasound examination. Following these women through the protracted processes of decision-making that led them to either abortion or birth, Haunting Images offers intimate ethnographic insights into day-to-day moral lives and a nuanced theoretical exploration of the forging of subjectivities in existentially fraught situations. In Vietnam, the book shows, the uptake of new reproductive technologies is shaped by moral-cosmological notions of human body-selves, by socialist health care traditions, and by the lingering consequences of a war that refuses to end. Based on this ethnographic material, Haunting Images proposes that there is reason for anthropology to pay closer attention to human quests for belonging—to people's strivings to tie themselves together with others and into larger worlds of being.