Temporal Attunements of Care: Scrutinising Counselling Practices in the Context of Prenatal Testing and Abortion

This article focuses on decision-making in the context of counselling practices around prenatal testing and disability-selective abortion in Austria and Germany. Starting from the conceptualisation of prenatal care as part of a risk-oriented anticipatory regime of reproduction, we show that there is an eminently temporal dimension to prenatal care that has received little scholarly attention to date. We centre on this dimension of care, asking how prenatal decision-making processes are enacted, shaped, limited and ordered by medico-legal time frames. We are specifically interested in what kind of care emerges in relation to these time frames and whom or what is taken care of in these processes. Based on the analysis of three ethnographic vignettes, we argue that good care in the context of prenatal testing and abortion unfolds through multiple modes of what we call 'temporal attunements' to particular needs, patients and situations. As pregnancy proceeds, different medico-legal times are invoked strategically in favour of practicing good care, and different subjects, objects and entities are moved into and out of the centre of care.