Dana S. Belu combines Heidegger’s phenomenology of technology with feminist phenomenology in order to make sense of the increased technicization of women’s reproductive bodies during conception, pregnancy, and birth.
Dana S. Belu combines Heidegger’s phenomenology of technology with feminist phenomenology in order to make sense of the increased technicization of women’s reproductive bodies during conception, pregnancy, and birth.
Dana S. Belu
Heidegger Motherhood Bioethics Fertility Technology maternal and child health
“It is an excellent work for anyone who wants to learn more about Heidegger, especially Heidegger's work on technology … . It is also an important work for feminist philosophers interested in IVF and/or surrogacy, since it provides a new way to understand their imbrication in the enframed and enframing world of modernity, a world, Belu shows, that both constructs and controls women as resources.” (Lorraine Markotic, Hypatia Reviews Online, hypatiareviews.org, November 2, 2020)
“How often do we come upon a book about Heidegger and the maternal body that puts some of Heidegger’s most ponderous musings on technology into clear English and applies them to something as concrete as childbirth? Dana S. Belu has done all this and more in an incisive analysis of both the promise and the risk that medical technology poses for the way we understand childbirth, motherhood and women. Don’t miss reading this important and topical book.” (John D. Caputo, Syracuse University, USA)
“The ambition of this remarkable book is to recover a sense of the deeper meaning of the technification of conception, pregnancy and birth through a critical analysis of contemporary practice.” (Andrew Feenberg, Simon Fraser University, Canada)
“This truly groundbreaking and original book is a welcome addition to the field of feminist phenomenology as well as to Heidegger scholarship, and it is central to discussions in feminist and gender theory more generally, philosophy of medicine,and medical and bio-ethics.” (Lisa Folkmarson Käll, Stockholm University, Sweden)
"This project is so exciting...because it breaks with [the] mold...[and] engage[s] in larger questions related to birth. .. It is a needed and welcome addition to literatures on childbirth, pregnancy, and reproductive technology." (Allison B. Wolf, Simpson College, USA)