It is now possible for physicians to recognize that a pregnant woman's fetus is facing life-threatening problems, perform surgery on the fetus, and if it survives, return it to the woman's uterus to finish gestation. Although fetal surgery has existed in various forms for three decades, it is only just beginning to capture the public's imagination. These still largely experimental procedures raise all types of medical, political and ethical questions. The Making of the Unborn Patient examines two important and connected events of the second half of the 20th century: the emergence of fetal surgery as a new medical specialty and the debut of the unborn patient.

INTRODUCTION: FETAL STORIES; 1. Discovering Fetal Life, 1870s-1920s; 2. Interpreting Fetal Bodies, 1930s-1970s; 3. Defining Fetal Personhood, 1973-1976; 4. Defending Fetal Rights: 1970s-1990s; 5. Debating Fetal Pain, 1984-2007; EPILOGUE: FETAL MEANINGS; NOTES; BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The delivery of high quality and equitable care for both mothers and newborns is complex and requires efforts across many sectors. The United States spends more on childbirth than any other country in the world, yet outcomes are worse than other high-resource countries, and even worse for Black and Native American women. There are a variety of factors that influence childbirth, including social determinants such as income, educational levels, access to care, financing, transportation, structural racism and geographic variability in birth settings. It is important to reevaluate the United States' approach to maternal and newborn care through the lens of these factors across multiple disciplines. Birth Settings in America: Outcomes, Quality, Access, and Choice reviews and evaluates maternal and newborn care in the United States, the epidemiology of social and clinical risks in pregnancy and childbirth, birth settings research, and access to and choice of birth settings.

Covers the latest insights any fetal specialist needs and provides essential knowledge for professionals caring for women with high-risk pregnancies.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Human embryos and foetuses are highly public and contested figures. Their visual images appear across a wide range of forums. They have become commercial commodities as part of the IVF industry and are the focus of intense debates regarding concepts of personhood. This book discusses these issues, drawing on social and cultural theory and research.

Icons of Life tells the engrossing and provocative story of an early twentieth-century undertaking, the Carnegie Institution of Washington's project to collect thousands of embryos for scientific study. Lynn M. Morgan blends social analysis, sleuthing, and humor to trace the history of specimen collecting. In the process, she illuminates how a hundred-year-old scientific endeavor continues to be felt in today's fraught arena of maternal and fetal politics. Until the embryo collecting project-which she follows from the Johns Hopkins anatomy department, through Baltimore foundling homes, and all the way to China-most people had no idea what human embryos looked like. But by the 1950s, modern citizens saw in embryos an image of "ourselves unborn," and embryology had developed a biologically based story about how we came to be. Morgan explains how dead specimens paradoxically became icons of life, how embryos were generated as social artifacts separate from pregnant women, and how a fetus thwarted Gertrude Stein's medical career. By resurrecting a nearly forgotten scientific project, Morgan sheds light on the roots of a modern origin story and raises the still controversial issue of how we decide what embryos mean.

Cesarean Section is the first book to chronicle this history. In exploring the creation of the complex social, cultural, economic, and medical factors leading to the surgery's increase, Jacqueline H. Wolf describes obstetricians' reliance on assorted medical technologies that weakened the skills they had traditionally employed to foster vaginal birth. She also reflects on an unsettling malpractice climate--prompted in part by a raft of dubious diagnoses--that helped to legitimize "defensive medicine," and a health care system that ensured cesarean birth would be more lucrative than vaginal birth. In exaggerating the risks of vaginal birth, doctors and patients alike came to view cesareans as normal and, increasingly, as essential. Sweeping change in women's lives beginning in the 1970s cemented this markedly different approach to childbirth.

The U.S. infant mortality rate is among the highest in the industrialized world, and Black babies are far more likely than white babies to die in their first year of life. Maternal mortality rates are also very high. Though the infant mortality rate overall has improved over the past century with public health interventions, racial disparities have not. Racism, poverty, lack of access to health care, and other causes of death have been identified, but not yet adequately addressed. The tragedy is twofold: it is undoubtedly tragic that babies die in their first year of life, and it is both tragic and unacceptable that most of these deaths are preventable. Despite the urgency of the problem, there has been little public discussion of infant loss. The question this book takes up is not why babies die; we already have many answers to this question. It is, rather, who cares that babies, mostly but not only Black and Native American babies, are dying before their first birthdays? More importantly, what are we willing to do about it? This book tracks social and cultural dimensions of infant death through 58 alphabetical entries, from Absence to ZIP Code. It centers women’s loss and grief, while also drawing attention to dimensions of infant death not often examined. It is simultaneously a sociological study of infant death, an archive of loss and grief, and a clarion call for social change.

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title In Lost, medical historian Shannon Withycombe weaves together women’s personal writings and doctors’ publications from the 1820s through the 1910s to investigate the transformative changes in how Americans conceptualized pregnancy, understood miscarriage, and interpreted fetal tissue over the course of the nineteenth century. Withycombe’s pathbreaking research reveals how Americans construed, and continue to understand, miscarriage within a context of reproductive desires, expectations, and abilities. This is the first book to utilize women’s own writings about miscarriage to explore the individual understandings of pregnancy loss and the multiple social and medical forces that helped to shape those perceptions. What emerges from Withycombe’s work is unlike most medicalization narratives.