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After several years of research within the United States on the instantiation of fetuses as social actors, as well as two summers of preliminary research in Oaxaca, Mexico, I began my dissertation project trying to understand how medical practitioners in public clinics orientated rural indigenous women in Oaxaca toward their fetuses. However, as I observed women’s routine prenatal examinations, I found that although ultrasounds were standard elements of prenatal care in Oaxaca, they were used simply as diagnostic objects, with doctors neither provoking nor encouraging personification or social bonding (see Rapp’s 1997 chapter “Real Time Fetus” for discussion of prototypical American experiences). Within this setting, women were socialized as appropriate pregnant subjects in ways that implicated their own selfcare practices rather than affective ties toward their future children. One concrete domain in which women were encouraged to conceptualize themselves as particular kinds of reproductive subjects was within explicit and implicit discussions of risk. In the public hospitals in which I spent nine months, narratives about producing reproductive health encouraged women to simultaneously view medical attention as essential for their own risk reduction and construct a personal sense of control over and responsibility for prenatal health in specific ways unmoored from technological information (in contra example to Rapp’s 1999