TY - JOUR
T1 - Moral pioneers
T2 - Women, men and fetuses on a frontier of reproductive technology
AU - Rapp, Rayna
N1 - Funding Information:
Each year, scores of thousands of American women choose to monitor their pregnancies for prenatal disabilities via amniocente-sis, and the number is rapidly growing. Indeed, the exact number of amniocenteses performed each year is unknown: in the same year (1983) three different government sources suggested 40,000, The field work on which this essay is based was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am grateful to both. I also want to thank the many women and their families who took this inquiry to heart, sharing their amniocentesis stories with me. The health professionals who aided my work have all believed in the importance of understanding their patients' experiences. I'm grateful for their trust. Many audiences of feminists-scholars and activists-have sharpened my work through the questions they have posed. Without them, the context for this inquiry would be immeasurably impoverished. O 1988 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights resewed.
PY - 1988/7/14
Y1 - 1988/7/14
N2 - As one of the new reproductive technologies, amniocentesis is rapidly becoming routinized, especially for pregnant women in their mid-thirties and older. Prenatal diagnosis has been evaluated medically, economically, and bioethically. But we know very little about how pregnant women and their families who use, or might use, this new technology respond to its benefits and burdens. This article reports on a two-year field study in New York City. Responses of genetic counselors, a multicultural patient population using and refusing amniocentesis, women who had received “positive diagnoses, and families with children who have the conditions that can now be diagnosed prenatally were all elicited through participant-observation. My goal in this study is to assess the social impact and cultural meaning of one new reproductive technology.
AB - As one of the new reproductive technologies, amniocentesis is rapidly becoming routinized, especially for pregnant women in their mid-thirties and older. Prenatal diagnosis has been evaluated medically, economically, and bioethically. But we know very little about how pregnant women and their families who use, or might use, this new technology respond to its benefits and burdens. This article reports on a two-year field study in New York City. Responses of genetic counselors, a multicultural patient population using and refusing amniocentesis, women who had received “positive diagnoses, and families with children who have the conditions that can now be diagnosed prenatally were all elicited through participant-observation. My goal in this study is to assess the social impact and cultural meaning of one new reproductive technology.
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U2 - 10.1300/J013v13n01_09
DO - 10.1300/J013v13n01_09
M3 - Article
C2 - 3504304
AN - SCOPUS:0023530065
SN - 0363-0242
VL - 13
SP - 101
EP - 117
JO - Women and Health
JF - Women and Health
IS - 1-2
ER -