Main description:

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.

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