Projecting Potentiality.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]