Surveillance, gender, and public health

From a review of Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body:

In Balsamo's strongest chapter, "Public Pregnancies," she confidently relates how new medical technologies of surveillance--laparoscopy, ultrasounds, and advanced drug testing--permit and even demand novel invasions of the female body. Using an example much in the news recently--criminal penalties against pregnant women on crack--Balsamo argues that such technologies assist the development of a cultural logic of surveillance, where the relationship of women's pregnant bodies to overall public health comes under new scrutiny. Such heightened examination turns pregnancy from an individual to a public experience, allowing doctors and even strangers on the street into the reproductive process. Using Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Balsamo reveals how this logic of surveillance could easily expand beyond society's have-nots, who represent an ideological testing ground of sorts, to general prescriptions defining all female bodies as "potentially maternal bodies and all pregnant bodies as inherently duplicitous and possible threatening to public health" (14).

The questions this raises:

• How do the very things we ascribe as benefits of surveillance come to be in the interest of "the public"? should it be so? how is that debate wrapped up in our cultural ideas of individualism vs communitarianism? (This is the tension between Etzioni and, say, the EFF.)
  
• How are certain people assigned the blame or responsibility for these matters of "public interest" and thus jusitified as subjects of surveillance? For example, why do we surveill suspected political activists to try to prevent terrorism rather than interrogate our public policies that might be the underlying cause of at least some terrorist activities?
• How does surveillance as a informational form appeal to our culture more than other modes of intervening in situations? How has a culture of spectacle, and especially a digital or quantifiable spectacle of manageable information, developed?