Community Event: Autism, the Maternal-Fetal Interface, and the Reconceptualization of Environmental Risk

Humanities Center Gender & Sexuality Seminar Series – The Maternal Imprint

Martine Lappé
Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA

Scientists have long been interested in identifying risk factors for autism spectrum disorders. In recent years, these efforts have come to focus on pregnancy as a particularly salient window into the effects of maternal environment, behavior, and physiology on the developing fetus. For example, recent findings have linked maternal immune dysregulation, medication use, toxic exposure, and placental health to increased risk of autism in offspring. These findings have led researchers to focus on what several prominent autism scientists have called “the womb as environment.” This paper draws on participant observation at scientific meetings, document analysis, and interviews with scientists, advocates, and mothers of children with autism to analyze the attention paid to the maternal-fetal interface in autism environmental research. I first detail the social, political, and historical conditions that have shaped causal understandings of autism spectrum disorders. I then describe the emergence and practices of contemporary autism research focused on gene-environment interactions, immunology, and epigenetics. Building on scholarship in medical sociology and feminist science studies, I argue that these areas of autism science are shifting understandings of ‘the environment’ and repositioning when, where, and how we identify and act upon health and illness. The paper describes the gendered implications of these sciences and considers their potential consequences for contemporary conceptualizations of motherhood, risk, and responsibility.

Martine Lappé is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco where her dissertation focused on the emergence, practices, and consequences of autism gene-environment interaction research. She is writing a book based on her dissertation titled Anticipating Autism: Navigating Science, Uncertainty, and Care in the Post-Genomic Era. Her scholarship considers the changing relationships between science and care in the post-genomic era, paying particular attention to the intersections of these changes with family life, experiences of risk, and biomedical research. Her current project focuses on the relationships between epigenetics and sciences related to maternal and child health.

Visit the event website http://wgs.fas.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k53419&pageid=icb.page62556 for more information and to download the pre-circulated paper and additional recommended readings. The 2013-2014 Harvard University Gender and Sexuality seminar series The Maternal Imprint will explore 20th and 21st-century ideas about the influence of a mother's behaviors, experiences, and physiology on the fate of her growing embryo. Of special focus are the gendered implications of emerging trends in the biomedical sciences - such as epigenetics - presently of broad public and scholarly interest. Events take place on Thursday evenings from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Baker Center (12 Quincy Street), unless noted. Free and open to the public.