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Medical Anthropology Quarterly

“More Than Just the Two Percent”: The reproductive politics of envisioning abortion and miscarriage in Turner syndrome

    Abstract

    Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the political, legal, and medical boundaries of spontaneous, elective, and selective abortion are blurring. Based on ethnographic research on Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition with a 98% miscarriage rate and uncertain abortion rates, this article examines the visual politics of reproduction and disability in the United States through the ambiguous treatment of miscarriage. Although infertile, my interlocutors with Turner syndrome emphasized how disability stereotypes, abortion unknowns, and miscarriage statistics impacted their lives. Centering our play More Than Just the Two Percent, I demonstrate how my interlocutors embodied various actors in reproductive experiences, including miscarried fetuses, to navigate the visibilities of their diagnosis and specify the value of their lives as social funds of knowledge—a process I term envisioning. Envisioning complicates notions of viability, personhood, privacy, spirituality, risk, luck, and survivorship that pro-life/pro-choice rhetorics flatten and may contribute to a more disability-oriented reproductive justice.