For the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, anthropologist Googie Karrass writes a review of Caroline Arni’s Of Human Born: Fetal Lives, 1800-1950. Click here to read the full review. Purchase the book here. An excerpt appears below:

“At a time when debates about the boundary between the pregnant person and the unborn carry profound consequences, Caroline Arni’s Of Human Born: Fetal Lives, 1800–1950 offers a timely exploration of how fetal life was conceptualized in the life sciences. Drawing on writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in physiology, pediatrics, and psychology, Arni examines how the emergence of the fetus as a biological object was intertwined with theories of maternal influence, revealing an overlooked history of maternal-fetal relationality. Empirical investigations into fetal life, she argues, far from resolving its status, embedded a “profound ontological indeterminacy” within the sciences as the question of when and how life became recognizably human persisted (246). Arni’s work, though grounded in historical contingency, opens pathways for understanding the enduring ambiguities surrounding the unborn in contemporary debates on reproduction, science, and ethics.”