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There are people dedicated to improving the way we eat, and people dedicated to improving the way we give birth. This title compares these two social movements and brings insight into the relationship between our most intimate, personal experiences, the industries that control them, and the social movements that resist the industrialisation of life and seek to birth change.
We are all citizens of the Biomedical Empire, though few of us know it, and even fewer understand the extent of its power. In this book, Barbara Katz Rothman clarifies that critiques of biopower and the "medical industrial complex" have not gone far enough, and asserts that the medical industry is nothing short of an imperial power. Factors as fundamental as one's citizenship and sex identity—drivers of our access to basic goods and services—rely on approval and legitimation by biomedicine. Moreover, a vast and powerful global market has risen up around the empire, making it one of the largest economic forces in the world. Katz Rothman shows that biomedicine has the key elements of an imperial power: economic leverage, the faith of its citizens, and governmental rule. She investigates the Western colonial underpinnings of the empire and its rapid intrusion into everyday life, focusing on the realms of birth and death. This provides her with a powerful vantage point from which to critically examine the current moment, when the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the power structures of the empire in unprecedented ways while sparking the most visible resistance it has ever seen.
"What a wonderful mix of scholarship and feeling! With insight and sympathy, Barbara Katz Rothman shows us how the new techniques for diagnosing fetal health problems confront pregnant women with new burdens and responsibilities. Anyone who thinks that prenatal diagnosis is liberating for women needs to read this book." -Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology, Harvard University
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How do couples get beyond the reactivity and blaming that destroy self-esteem and good will? How can couples sort out the multiple layers and complexities in their relationships? Is it possible to move from impasse to dialogue? Here, in one brief volume, are the answers to these questions and many others. Doing Couple Therapy will be a lifesaver for family therapy students and beginning therapists. In a straightforward manner, the authors sift through years of family therapy theory to draw out for readers a a treasury of ways to sort out the many factors, past and present, that crowd couples' relationships. These include family-of-origin issues, previous relationships, secrets, children, in-...
The much heralded "completion" of the human genome project in the year 2000 raises urgent questions: Do we now have a map of who we are? How will we control the uses of the potentially healing but also likely destructive and highly marketable information genetics brings us? Using her own life as well as her research, Barbara Katz Rothman presents an impassioned defense for the theory that humans are not "ready made from the factory", as one recent popular book on genetics put it, but social beings who grow, mature, and learn who they are.
Facing the polar forces of an epidemic of Cesarean sections and epidurals and home-like labor rooms, American birth is in transition. Caught between the most extreme medicalization — best seen in a Cesarean section rate of nearly 30 percent — and a rhetoric of women’s "choices" and "the natural," women and their midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses labor on. Laboring On offers the voices of all of these practitioners, all women trying to help women, as they struggle with this increasingly split vision of birth. Updating Barbara Katz Rothman's now-classic In Labor, the first feminist sociological analysis of birth in the United States, Laboring On gives a comprehensive picture of the ever-changing American birth practices and often conflicting visions of birth practitioners. The authors deftly weave compelling accounts of birth work, by midwives, doulas, obstetricians, and nurses, into the larger sociohistorical context of health care practices and activism and offer provocative arguments about the current state of affairs and the future of birth in America.
This volume presents a variety of unique perspectives on mothering as a socially constructed relationship, assessing many of the political, legal and cultural debates surrounding the issue.
"What a wonderful mix of scholarship and feeling! With insight and sympathy, Barbara Katz Rothman shows us how the new techniques for diagnosing fetal health problems confront pregnant women with new burdens and responsibilities. Anyone who thinks that prenatal diagnosis is liberating for women needs to read this book." -Ruth Hubbard, professor of biology, Harvard University