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Imperfect Pregnancies : A History of Birth Defects and Prenatal Diagnosis /
In the 1960s, thanks to the development of prenatal diagnosis, medicine found a new object of study: the living fetus. At first, prenatal testing was proposed only to women at a high risk of giving birth to an impaired child. But in the following decades, such testing has become routine. In Imperfec...
| Autor principal: | |
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| Formato: | Electrónico eBook |
| Idioma: | Inglés |
| Publicado: |
Baltimore :
Johns Hopkins University Press,
2017.
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| Colección: | Book collections on Project MUSE.
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| Temas: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Texto completo |
| Sumario: | In the 1960s, thanks to the development of prenatal diagnosis, medicine found a new object of study: the living fetus. At first, prenatal testing was proposed only to women at a high risk of giving birth to an impaired child. But in the following decades, such testing has become routine. In Imperfect Pregnancies, Ilana Löwy argues that the generalization of prenatal diagnosis has radically changed the experience of pregnancy for tens of millions of women worldwide. Löwy follows the rise of biomedical technologies that made prenatal diagnosis possible and investigates the institutional, sociocultural, economic, legal, and political consequences of their widespread diffusion. Because prenatal diagnosis is linked to the contentious issue of selective termination of pregnancy for a fetal anomaly, debates on this topic have largely centered on the rejection of human imperfection and the notion that we are now perched on a slippery slope that will lead to new eugenics. Imperfect Pregnancies tells a more complicated story, emphasizing that there is no single standardized way to scrutinize the fetus, but there are a great number of historically conditioned and situated approaches. -- Provided by publisher. |
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| Descripción Física: | 1 online resource (296 pages). |
| ISBN: | 9781421423647 |