Time, magic, and gynecology: contemporary Israeli practice

This paper describes the way in which a simple device, the pregnancy wheel, has been used by the medical profession to impose a new way of measuring and experiencing pregnancy. The change involves counting in weeks instead of counting in months and it is gradually replacing a commonsensical method that had deep physiological and cultural roots. In contrast, the medical methodology of counting forty weeks is more complicated and lacks direct connections to the events of pregnancy. In the encounter between the doctor and the pregnant woman the pregnancy wheel has a variety of uses, among them determinations of the age and estimated size of the fetus. It plays an additiional role, however, in the medicalization of pregnancy by providing the doctor with privileged information. It also influences modes of thinking through the way in which it deals with the question of the beginning of pregnancy, a question that has clear moral implications.