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Transparent Women, Visible Genes, and New Conceptions of Disease

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Ruth Hubbard
Affiliation:
Professor of Biology Emerita, Harvard University.

Extract

Technological innovations have transformed our culture's ways of thinking about procreation and pregnancy, and about health and illness. Until not so long ago, the ongoing processes inside women's bodies as they gestated their future babies was up to conjecture. In Western industrialized countries, pregnancy was the slow process during which a woman gradually came to accept the fact that she was sharing her bodily space with another, and that now, as well as after the baby emerged, the primary responsibility for that new person's survival would be hers.

Type
Special Section: Designs on Life: Choice, Control, and Responsibility in Genetic Manipulation
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

Notes

1. Duden, B. Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn. Cambridge, Massachu setts: Harvard University Press, 1993:chapt. 2.Google Scholar

2. See note 1. Duden, . 1993:12.Google Scholar

3. Gilbert, W. A vision of the grail. In: Kevles, DJ, Hood, L, Eds. Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992:96.Google Scholar

4. Hubbard, R, Wald, E. Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.Google Scholar

5. Duster, T. Backdoor to Eugenics. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar