write reflective thoughts on what came to your mind when you studied the assigned reading materials ofAnnual Editions: Human Development.Annual Editions: Human Development, 48/e UNIT Prepared by: Claire N. Rubman, Suffolk County Community College, Selden, NY Genetics and Prenatal Influences on Development Some women yearn to experience pregnancy while others seek out an abortion. Read about the search for each in this section. We will also discuss same-sex couples and their surro- gacy journey that included disappointment, prejudice, and dis- crimination on their journey to success. Read about the birthing experience and the PTSD that some women experience. What does it feel like to be pregnant, give birth, or have a C-Section? Some women get to experience these firsthand, while others rely on surrogacy or adoption to start a family. The pregnancy avatar tries to simulate the experience through a pregnancy game. Read about its benefits and limitations in ''The Pregnant Avatar: Seeing Oneself in C-Sections, Surro- gates, and Sonograms" by Theadora Walsh (2017). Back in the real world, on January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court decreed that Norma Mccorvey (Jane Roe) could have an abortion even although it was not medically necessary to save her life. It was decreed that •~ woman's choice to have an abor- tion outweighs the State's concern for prenatal life-up until the point of viability" (Morshedi, 2018). This has become known as "Roe versus Wade." What would happen if the landmark "Roe versus Wade" decision was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2018? Would abortion clinics go "underground"? Read about this movement that has already mobilized in "The New Abortion Underground" by Nina Liss-Schultz, 2018. How will this impact women's rights in the future? For women who choose to bring their pregnancy to term, what is the birthing experience really like? Audrey Goodson Kingo (2018) walks us through the disappointment and misery that some women encounter while giving birth. She reports that as many as one in seven women develops a mood or anxiety disorder as a result of the childbirth experience. Read about the effects on the psyche including psychosis, obsessive compul- sive disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Why do only 30 percent of women who suffer from these aftereffects receive the help that they so desperately need? Why are African American women twice as likely to be impacted by these disorders? On a brighter note, read about Dell and Robert's adoption of their daughter Heiress. Read their parenting advice as they successfully navigate family life with their seven-year-old daugh- ter. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 115,064 same-sex couples adopted children in the United States in 2010. Approxi- mately 2 million LGBTQ couples are interested in adopting with 4 percent of all adopted children in the United States living with same-sex parents. The Pregnant Avatar: Seeing Oneself in (-Sections, Surrogates, and Sonograms by Theadora Walsh Article The Pregnant Avatar: Seeing Oneself in C-Sections, Surrogates, and Sonograms THEADORA WALSH Learning Outcomes After reading this article, you will be able to: • Explain the concept of cognitive dissonance in relation to online pregnancy games. • Discuss the importance of a sonogram during pregnancy especially for surrogate mothers. • Describe how the Akanksha Infertility Clinic functions for surrogate mothers. Aquick Google search for "games for girls" yields a rather finite set of categories. There are cooking games, dress-up games, makeup games, shopping games, a few that feature household chores, childcare games, and preg- nancy games. What exactly is a pregnancy game? How can the physical and emotional labor of forcing life into the world be conveyed as entertainment? Perhaps more pressingly, why does such a form of online engagement even exist? Sifting through the hues of pink and purple that punctuate websites devoted to games for girls, I learned that pregnancy games are formulaic. Almost like recipes or the washing instructions on clothing tags, these games transform the travails of childbirth into a series of regimented and repetitive tasks. Through strictly enforced steps, the player may give the preg- nant woman an ultrasound, send her a message, dress her in maternity clothes, or, quite ambitiously, perform a C-section. I am interested in the way pregnancy games fit into under- standings of gender and emotional labor in a world intimately linked through technological globalism. When young people identify with representations of pregnant women there are instructive assumptions about the Female body in labor implied by the constructed game. When technologies allow for the projection of the self into virtual worlds, identity is redefined by the structured and subjective realities of that representation. By enabling emotional identification with a rendered alternate experience, the avatar enables an extension of perspective. Ava- tars, icons that represent particular people, are both intimately linked to the person they represent and formally estranged. Considering the subjective association young girls might have with avatars in pregnancy games, I wonder how a relationship to one's own body might become representational during the lived experience of childbirth. In many ways, childbirth forces a sensitivity to futurity, as the pregnant woman must think about how her present choices will affect her child's future. The pregnant female body becomes a representation, or symbol, of the child to be born. When people transfer the responsibilities and physicality of childbirth to a surrogate mother, the body of the woman carrying the unborn baby in the real world becomes even more like an avatar. When a mother proudly gazes upon a high-definition sonogram image, she has attained another virtual avatar for her unborn baby. New rela- tionships formed through technology are paradoxical. They create possibilities for experiencing otherness but are limited by the inherent subjectivity that exists in building or entering any constructed world. In the myriad of pregnancy games available, young players can select a number of culturally recognizable figures to act as their avatars. Elsa and her younger sister Anna from Frozen (2013, directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee) give birth; they sometimes have twins. Barbie has a baby. Cinderella is pregnant, as are Belle, Rapunzel, and Ariel-the mermaid. My Little Pony gets knocked up, and so does a cartoon version of Beyonce. Even a Minion from the Pixar film Despicable Me (2010, directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud) is gendered and then impreg- nated. The characters that young people impersonate are avail- able to be anesthetized, X-rayed, and put under the knife. Annual Editions: Human Development, 48/e In these pregnancy games, the Barbies and princesses and My Little Ponies are unaffected by the act of giving birth. Pre- disposed to a fabricated loveliness, they sit in operating chairs beaming and blinking enormous eyes. Their lips are painted red, their hair is prom-queen perfect, and their gowns are pushed up to expose a belly. Before the C-Section is performed, some of these online games let the player give the pregnant cartoon a face mask or makeover. Never are their recognizable faces dis- torted by pain or fear. One of the major steps in most of the games is the conduc- tion of an ultrasound. After a curled-up cartoon baby is shown on the screen, the player makes an incision. Soon the same image of the baby miraculously floats above the mother's belly. Something in the simplicity of the movement is particularly eerie. One can imagine the animator of the game selecting a preinstalled fade-in option, equating the process of birth to an aesthetic convention typically used in Microsoft PowerPoint presentations or car commercials. I have two young cousins from Thailand. Before we were able to converse in English, I watched as they expertly searched for You Tube videos ofTinkerbell on their mother's iPad. Hyper- accessible images and scenarios can be preverbal for children living after the onset of the Internet. Before they were able to participate in American culture relationally or verbally, they could project themselves into the world through identification with the magical dispositions of impossibly formed cartoons. Disney princesses and Barbies are cartoon caricatures of women, for the most part designed to represent the apex of androcentric desire. The use of these fantastical figures pre- disposes young players who already identify with these char- acters to project attachments and expectations into the game, endowing the play with an emotional poignancy. This can cause players to identify with the structurally limited iteration of femininity celebrated by patriarchal forces. We know all too well the way the world betrays young women. In The Female Complaint (2008) Lauren Berlant laments that "unlike other victims of generic social discrimination, women are expected to live with and desire the parties who have traditionally and institutionally denied them legitimacy and autonomy."1 To attach a simplified version of childbirth to the already emotion- ally loaded image of Disney princesses necessarily connects pregnancy in the games with conditioned ideas about femi- ninity. While a young player might emotionally identify with the woman giving birth, the games position the player as the doctor. From the perspective of a pair of sterilized and gloved hands, pregnancy looks simple. Seeing through the eyes of the doctor suggests a clean separation of mother and child. Hor- monal changes, physical pain, postpartum depression-none of these bodily experiences are part of the perspective. In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag warns that "despite the illusion of giving understanding, what seeing through photographs really invites is an acquisitive relation to the world that nourishes aesthetic awareness and promotes emotional detachment."2 The cognitive dissonance of the com- puter screen inundates the player with emotional neutrality toward childbirth. Pregnancy becomes understood as proce- dural, sterile, and distant. The game then replaces emotional distance with an abstract sense of fulfillment. With human complexity transformed by the game's design, the images func- tion in a virtual plane in which the experiential spectrum of childbirth is aesthetically minimized. The sonogram, which hovers in the games like a final goal or finish line, demands attention. The sonogram is received as a representation inside of a representation. In contrast to the two- dimensional sonograms of real life that offer a striking contrast with three-dimensional reality, the games' ultrasound machines render images of babies no different than the one that will later hover above the pregnant mothers' bodies. The sonogram portrays the fetus as outline. Visible in a time before the complexity of relationality and development begins to shape personality, the sonogram shows the child as genetic image. Free from the realities of temporalicy, the sonogram is not yet imbued with character. Instead, the image allows for free association and projection. While sonograms have medical purposes, these pictures aesthetically remind one of the "Spirit photography" of late nineteenth-century America: they create an image that can be interpreted and given meaning without being constrained to actualities. The sonogram functions like an avatar. It is a representation that can be imaginatively cus- tomized by particular interpretation and preference. Arlie Russell Hochschild's The Outsourced Self: Intimate Life in Market Times (2012) is an ethnographic collection of interviews with women involved in the rapidly expanding sur- rogacy market. In the field, Hochschild found an unquantifiable intimacy that often gets lost in market exchanges and global capitalism. Particularly interesting is the relationship between surrogate mother and sonogram that she encountered. Leela, a woman Hochschild met in Anand, Gujarat, India, said that she thought of the baby she carried as her own because "I saw his hands and legs on the sonogram ... To this day I feel I have three children and one of them I gave as a gift."3 The surro- gate mother can become emotionally attached to the sonogram, using it as a tool of identification. The affective response allows for a sense of possession and a possibility to imagine the baby, which is inseparable from the mother's own body, empatheti- cally. Sonograms allow both mothers-the surrogate mother and the genetic mother-to see the baby as their own ava- tar. However, while the surrogate looks at the sonogram with emotional attachment, the genetic parents also consider it as a source of evaluation. Here there actually is a sort of "game" involved in the image of the fetus. The surrogate has "won" if the baby is healthy. The Pregnant Avatar: Seeing Oneself in (-Sections, Surrogates, and Sonograms by Theadora Walsh However, if the baby is miscarried or born with a disease, the surrogate will "lose," and suffer the economic consequences. To the adopting parents, the less quantifiable elements of the surrogate's "success"· or "failure" at the "game" are estranged. The information comes remotely, often through a computer. Games can create a space in the world that is not the world by rendering an alternate visual reality. Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that is it only through tools that the world as we see it becomes "apparent