Description
Book Synopsis Nominated for the 2007 Book Prize by the Council on Anthropology and Reproduction (AAA)
Reproductive disruptions, such as infertility, pregnancy loss, adoption, and childhood disability, are among the most distressing experiences in people’s lives. Based on research by leading medical anthropologists from around the world, this book examines such issues as local practices detrimental to safe pregnancy and birth; conflicting reproductive goals between women and men; miscommunications between pregnant women and their genetic counselors; cultural anxieties over gamete donation and adoption; the contested meanings of abortion; cultural critiques of hormone replacement therapy; and the globalization of new pharmaceutical and assisted reproductive technologies. This breadth - with its explicit move from the “local” to the “global,” from the realm of everyday reproductive practice to international programs and policies - illuminates most effectively the workings of power, the tensions between women’s and men’s reproductive agency, and various cultural and structural inequalities in reproductive health.
Trade Review “This volume engages with the politics of human reproduction and will prove an invaluable teaching resource in that field and beyond…[It] thus marks something of a watershed, and there are some fascinating tensions and contrasts to be found here.” · JRAI
“This anthology contains important entries from many award-winning senior ethnologists and cultural or medical anthropologists coming from various theoretical perspectives but all addressing intersecting levels of inequality.” · Science & Society
Table of Contents Preface
Marcia C. Inhorn
Introduction: Defining Women’s Health: A Dozen Messages from More than 150 Ethnographies
Marcia C. Inhorn
Appendix
List of Abbreviations
PART I: REPRODUCTION AND DISRUPTION: REDEFINING THE CONTOURS OF NORMALCY
Chapter 1. The Dialectics of Disruption: Paradoxes of Nature and Professionalism in Contemporary American Childbearing
Caroline H. Bledsoe and Rachel Scherrer
Chapter 2. Designing a Woman-Centered Health Care Approach to Pregnancy Loss: Lessons from Feminist Models of Childbirth
Linda Layne
Chapter 3. Enlarging Reproduction, Screening Disability
Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg
Chapter 4. Openness in Adoption: Re-Thinking “Family” in the US
Harold D. Grotevant
PART II: REPRODUCTION, GENDER AND BIOPOLITICS: lOCAL-GLOBAL INTERSECIONS AND CONTESTATATIONS
Chapter 5. Can Gender “Equity” in Prenatal Genetic Services Unintentionally Reinforce Male Authority?
C. H. Browner
Chapter 6. When the Personal is Political: Contested Reproductive Strategies among West African Migrants in France
Carolyn Sargent
Chapter 7. Reproductive Disruptions and Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the Muslim World
Marcia C. Inhorn
Chapter 8. The Final Disruption? Biopolitics of Post-Reproductive Life
Margaret Lock
List of Contributors
Bibliography
Index
