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At women's expense : state power and the politics of fetal rights / Cynthia R. Daniels.
Author
Daniels, Cynthia R.
[Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/Created
Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993.
Description
183 pages ; 25 cm
Availability
Available Online
JSTOR DDA
Ebook Central Perpetual, DDA and Subscription Titles
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Call Number
Status
Location Service
Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks
KF481 .D36 1993
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Details
Subject(s)
Fetus
—
Legal status, laws, etc
—
United States
[Browse]
Pregnant women
—
Legal status, laws, etc
—
United States
[Browse]
Fetus
[Browse]
Pregnancy
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Women's rights
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Summary note
Some say the fetus is the "tiniest citizen." If so, then the bodies of women themselves have become political arenas - or, recent cases suggest, battlefields: A cocaine-addicted mother is convicted of drug trafficking through the umbilical cord. Women employees at a battery plant must prove infertility to keep their jobs. A terminally ill woman is forced to undergo a cesarean section. No longer concerned with conception or motherhood, the new politics of fetal rights focuses on fertility and pregnancy itself, on a woman's relationship with the fetus. How exactly, Cynthia Daniels asks, does this affect a woman's rights? Are they different from a man's? And how has the state helped determine the difference? The answers, rigorously pursued throughout this book, give us a detailed look into the state's paradoxical role in gender politics - as both a challenger of injustice and an agent of social control. In benchmark legal cases concerned with forced medical treatment, fetal protectionism in the workplace, and drug and alcohol use and abuse, Daniels shows us state power at work in the struggle between fetal rights and women's rights. These cases raise critical questions about the impact of gender on women's standing as citizens, and about the relationship between state power and gender inequality. Fully appreciating the difficulties of each case, the author probes the subtleties of various positions and their implications for a deeper understanding of how a woman's reproductive capability affects her relationship to state power. In her analysis, the need to defend women's right to self-sovereignty becomes clear, but so does the need to define further the very concepts of self-sovereignty and privacy. The intensity of the debate over fetal rights suggests the depth of the current gender crisis and the force of the feelings of social dislocation generated by reproductive politics. Breaking through the public mythology that clouds these debates, At Women's Expense makes a hopeful beginning toward liberating woman's body within the body politic.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references (p. [151]-173) and index.
Contents
Fetal rights, gender difference, and political power
Fetal animation: the political and cultural emergence of fetal rights
Bodily integrity and forced medical treatment: the case of Angela Carder
From protecting the woman to privileging the fetus: the case of Johnson Controls
The politics of vengeance: the case of Jennifer Johnson
Toward a new body politics.
Show 3 more Contents items
ISBN
0674050436 ((alk. paper))
9780674050433 ((alk. paper))
LCCN
93004102
OCLC
28017392
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At women's expense : state power and the politics of fetal rights / Cynthia R. Daniels.
id
99115120983506421
At women's expense [electronic resource] : state power and the politics of fetal rights / Cynthia R. Daniels.
id
99125349837406421