With epistemological canniness and a fine sense of subtlety, Valerie Hartouni traces how the humanized ‘fetal form’ takes shape as an accepted and undisputed object of cultural perception. She offers as well an analysis of what happens in policy debates when this ‘form’ is taken for granted. These wry analytic forays are iconoclastic in the best sense. Cultural Conceptions takes apart the icons that have been valorized as given objects of perception, exposing what has become sacralized in the making of the object, subjecting a perceptual piety to the glare of critical attention, and providing an altogether new, and disarming, account of the graphic politics of reproduction.