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

Copies in the Library

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Firestone Library - Stacks KF481 .D36 1993 Browse related items Request

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    Subject(s)
    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.
    ISBN
    • 0674050436 ((alk. paper))
    • 9780674050433 ((alk. paper))
    LCCN
    93004102
    OCLC
    28017392
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