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When three whistle-blowers informed authorities and the media in 1995 that doctors at the prestigious and lucrative Center for Reproductive Health -- a fertility clinic operated by the University of California, Irvine (UCI) -- were taking eggs from some women and implanting them into others without donor consent, a scandal unfolded that ended careers, destroyed reputations, and forever altered the lives of many families. This first incident of egg and embryo theft, as well as claims of insurance fraud, research misconduct, and misappropriation of funds, grabbed headlines around the world and was featured on television programs from Primetime to The Oprah Winfrey Show. By the time the scandal...
This book explores the arguments, appeals, and narratives that have defined the meaning of infertility in the modern history of the United States and Europe. Throughout the last century, the inability of women to conceive children has been explained by discrepant views: that women are individually culpable for their own reproductive health problems, or that they require the intervention of medical experts to correct abnormalities. Using doctor-patient correspondence, oral histories, and contemporaneous popular and scientific news coverage, Robin Jensen parses the often thin rhetorical divide between moralization and medicalization, revealing how dominating explanations for infertility have e...
As many as one in five couples in some population groups might be involuntarily childless and, despite the attention attracted by technological advances and media coverage, people often feel themselves to be totally isolated, stigmatised, and misunderstood by many professionals and ordinary people. Childless: No Choice is based on original research into the emotional and social aspects of involuntary childlessness, the main component being a long-term study of the experiences of couples attending an infertility clinic, supported by a community survey and a study of the attitudes of general practitioners. At a time of rapidly developing treatments for infertility and new legislative controls,...
Infertility affects nearly 6.1 million women and 2.1 million married couples in the United States. Additionally, 25 percent of women of childbearing age will experience a miscarriage and one in 80 pregnancies will end in a stillbirth. In Hope Deferred, we hear the voices of five female scholars from a variety of Christian denominations--Church of the Brethren, Disciples of Christ, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic--as they share their very private stories of painful loss in the hope of bringing comfort and a theological understanding to those who have experienced reproductive loss.
This collection considers how maternal regret, as it is conveyed in remorse, resentment, dissatisfaction, and disappointment, troubles the assumptions and mandates of normative motherhood and how it is explored and critiqued in creative non-fiction, film, literature, and social media. Maternal regret is also examined in relation to the estrangement of mother and child and the remorse and grief felt by both mothers and children caused by the abandonment of mother or child. Finally, the collection explores how regret opens the space for maternal erudition, enlightenment, and evolution; and makes possible maternal empowerment. The book is organized by way of these three sections: the first “R...
Licensing Parents addresses the relationship between poverty, unemployment, and other socio-economic issues to competent parenting in a unique and creative manner. Examines why the current generation of children and youth is the first in our nation's history to be less well-off--psychologically, socially, and morally--than their parents were at the same age.
Motherhood remains a complex and contested issue in feminist research as well as public discussion. This interdisciplinary volume explores cultural representations of motherhood in various contemporary European contexts, including France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and it considers how such representations affect the ways in which different individuals and groups negotiate motherhood as both institution and lived experience. It has a particular focus on literature, but it also includes essays that examine representations of motherhood in philosophy, art, social policy, and film. The book’s driving contention is that, through intersecting with other fields and disciplines,...
Caught between the ideological positions she had embraced and the reality of her sterility, she cast about for alternatives. In the early years of her widowhood, she took up writing in a serious way, admitting that she found writing therapeutic. Her story, little known to modern readers on either side of the Atlantic, may nevertheless be a perfect case study of a woman's "coming to writing" in post-revolutionary France. This book explores the crucial connections between her self-perceived "defectiveness" and her literary production."--Jacket.