{"id":34,"date":"2019-02-20T07:12:41","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T12:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010-spring-2018\/?page_id=34"},"modified":"2019-05-14T19:49:35","modified_gmt":"2019-05-14T23:49:35","slug":"log-4","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/data-collection-logs\/log-4\/","title":{"rendered":"Log 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><em>Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date. <\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>What data did you collect?<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>What is your initial impression of the data? <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>How have the data you have collected this week changed\/progressed your thinking about your research project? <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data? <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>What are your next steps?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Testing the Women, Testing the Fetus<\/p>\n<p>My new argument (?): Family progress is a precursor to economic progress, a pillar of neoliberalism.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Amniocentesis: amniotic fluid test\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cmedical procedure[1] used in prenatal diagnosis of chromosomal abnormalities and fetal infections,[2] and also for sex determination, in which a small amount of amniotic fluid, which contains fetal tissues, is sampled from the amniotic sac surrounding a developing fetus, and then the fetal DNA is examined for genetic abnormalities.\u201d (Wikipedia)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>2<sup>nd<\/sup>trimester<\/li>\n<li>Women may choose to continue or end the pregnancy should the fetus have a serious fetal diagnosis<\/li>\n<li>\u201c\u2026 they are forced to judge the quality of their own fetuses, making concrete and embodied decisions about the standards for entry into the human community\u201d (3): interesting phrasing<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>National and International Contexts<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cThis has affected aspects of prenatal testing as overt as recommended age and cost efficiency, as covert as the directiveness or neutrality of the counseling that accompanies testing, including the issue of whether and how directly women are pressured to continue or end a pregnancy in which a diagnosis of serious fetal disability has been made\u201d (32)\n<ul>\n<li>The \u201cthis\u201d is most Western developed countries except the US having national health policies and funding (32)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Most EU countries, the recommended age for amniocentesis is \u201cfor pregnant women who would be 40 or older at the time of delivery\u201d (32-33).<\/li>\n<li>\u201cIn the United States, 35 was quickly established as the recommended age for the test, and the \u201cage barrier\u201d has dropped into the lower thirties in a free market economy in health care\u201d (33)<\/li>\n<li>America: \u201c\u2019value-free\u2019 counseling process\u2026 The decision to have or reject the test, and to continue or end a pregnancy should a serious fetal disability be diagnosed are, in principle, sacrosanct\u2026 In England, by contrast, three-quarters of the obstetricians surveyed in one study replied that they required women to agree in principle to terminate an affected pregnancy before they perform an amniocentesis. In the Federal Republic of Germany and in Hungary, geneticists see no problem with directive counseling. While a woman may change her mind, the medical-administrative rationale behind such requirements assumes that any response to a \u201cpositive diagnosis\u201d besides abortion is a waste of scarce national medical resources\u201d (33)<\/li>\n<li>\u201cbroader demographic trends which have influenced the decline of fertility rates throughout the West\u2026 the extension of \u2018childhood,\u2019 including the high costs of education children, making them \u2018luxury consumer goods\u2019 for many sectors of the population; the rise of divorce rates and concomitant dependence of some groups of mothers and small children on government-provided welfare benefits increasingly under attack\u201d (33-34)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Women\u2019s Agency<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cFor these women, carriers of serious, often life-threatening diseases, early abortion was a more acceptable solution than late abortion or no abortion at all; they therefore enrolled their bodies and their fetuses in the experimental search for prenatal diagnosis\u201d (34)\n<ul>\n<li>Because children with serious disabilities can potentially hurt a family financially\/ those children would not be independent actors in the free market, in neoliberal terms<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Eugenics and Geneticization<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cThird, the \u2018individual choice\u2019 model of reproduction as noneugenic requires some interrogation. Because \u2018choice\u2019 is market-driven in contemporary North American culture, it appears to be based on expanding possibilities. But at the same time, available options are shaped by complex forces that travel as the \u2018invisible hand\u2019 of the market, in this case the market in genetic research. When \u2018everything\u2019 from well-characterized single-chromosome conditions like Down Syndrome to polygenic syndromes like manic depressions or alcoholism to alleged syndromes like a propensity for antisocial behavior or obesity can be popularly attributed to genetics and prenatally diagnosed, we may soon be standing on a \u2018slippery slope\u2019 of a \u2018eugenic boutique\u2019. Whose individual choices will these be? More subtly, who will frame the values within which those individuals making reproductive choices come of age? That is, attributing safety to an individual-choice model foregrounds personal liberty while backgrounding the social matrix of a technoscientific marketplace to whose requisites individual choices are increasingly enrolled\u201d (37-38)<\/li>\n<li>\u201c\u2026 the age old dream of perfectibility permitted an expanding structure of sentiment in favor of what Robert Sinsheimer as early as 1969 called \u2018a new eugenics.\u2019 In his view, an emergent biomedical eugenics would be implemented on the individual level in favor of normalcy. This idea of \u2018the right to normalcy\u2019 as a new eugenics is \u2018an ideological expansion of molecular biology into both popular culture and medicine.\u2019 To advocate a \u2018right to normalcy\u2019 presumes that we know what that means. To characterize normalcy in the language of biomedical \u2018rights\u2019 is also to individualize it. It is this trust that \u2018the normal\u2019 can be well characterized and individually \u2018selected,\u2019 which lies at the heart of the new eugenics. This new eugenics will be individually choice-driven. \u2018It entails the responsibility for arbitrating normality,\u2019 in Keller\u2019s terms.\u201d (38)<\/li>\n<li>\u201c\u2026 \u2018geneticization\u2019: The extreme reduction of al problematic differences to an individual and genetic basis\u2026 You are the product of your (genetic) lineage has made you, and problematic social differences can hardly be alleviated by social policy because our diseases, disabilities, distresses, and troublesome demeanors lie locked in our genes.\u201d (39)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Social Movements<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cexperience of having a \u2018tentative pregnancy\u2019 while anxiously awaiting the results of amniocentesis\u201d (47)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Between weeks 8 and 12, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date. What data did you collect? What is your initial impression of the data? How have the data you have collected this week changed\/progressed your thinking about your research project? What challenges did you &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/data-collection-logs\/log-4\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Log 4&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-34","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/sociology-3010b-spring-2019-gpimente\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}