Resumen de Projecting Potentiality: understanding Maternal Serum Screening in Contemporary China
Based on ethnographic research on prenatal health care in China from 2005 to 2007, in this paper I show how ideas about potentiality have a tendency to increase anxieties about anomalous births that many believe can and should be prevented. Focusing on maternal serum screening (MSS), I examine how through local agencies and with the help of the market the state has developed a �quality-assurance regime� that recruits expectant mothers to take active measures of self-assurance. Under such circumstances, MSS is promoted as the safest and most economical and efficient method to predict the potential of the only child. In practice, however, as a screening test, the results of MSS only offer a probability, either �high risk� or �low risk.� Facing such uncertainty, pregnant women question the doctors who conduct the tests and deliver the results that offer only vague information. At this point, the quality-assurance regime fails.
