Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (The Anthropology of Everyday Life) (The Anthropology of Everydaylife)

Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing technologies. Based on the author's decade of research and her own personal experiences with amniocentesis, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus explores the "geneticization" of family life in all its complexity and diversity. The book contains no figures. "Rayna Rapp, one of America's leading feminist anthropologists, has spent more than a decade researching the social impact of amniocentesis. Drawing upon hundreds of women's stories - and her own - she shows us the human faces behind these new reproductive technologies. Their lives, their stories, and their decisions ask difficult questions about the role of scientific knowledge and genetic research in understanding what it is to be human."--BOOK JACKET. To test or not to test? Advances in medical technology now tell us more than we have ever known about an unborn child. But how much do we want to know, and at what cost? Rayna Rapp, one of America's leading feminist anthropologists, has spent more than a decade researching the social impact of amniocentesis. Drawing upon hundreds of women's stories, as well as her own, she shows us the human faces behind these new reproductive technologies THIS BOOK EXPLORES the social impact and cultural meaning of prenatal diagnosis, one of the most routinized of the new reproductive technologies.