European University Institute Library

Imperfect pregnancies, a history of birth defects and prenatal diagnosis, Ilana Löwy

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Imperfect pregnancies

bibliography

971615586

Ilana Löwy

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 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

Introduction : scrutinized fetuses -- Born imperfect : birth defects before prenatal diagnosis -- Karyotypes -- Human malformations -- From prenatal diagnosis to prenatal screening -- Sex chromosome aneuploidies -- PND and new genomics approaches -- Conclusion : PND's slippery slopes, imagined and real