The antinomies of the practical and the emotional, of the use value of our bodies and the psychic investment we place on it, continues to structure the way in which biomedicine is interpreted to the female subject by even the most sympathetic practitioners in Australia today. Choices structured by these discursive oppositions compel women to participate in conceptually dissecting their reproductive bodies even before they experience the surgical dissection. Fertility is reduced in its meanings to the finite and concrete behavioural actions and decisions as to whether or not to have a(nother) child, and the focus is placed on the uterus as a purely mechanical organ, now impaired in its functioning. To continue to experience one's body as a more integral unity becomes a matter of emotional attachment to an organ that is clearly impaired – an allowable scenario, but one closely aligned with the irrational.

Meanwhile, as the woman wrestles with the ‘choices’ she becomes a participant in a process where, more than ever, she comes to view her own body as an object of visualization and spectatorship.