Testing Women, Testing the Fetus is a compelling ethnography of the lived experience of geneticization of American society. It is a deeply human account of the embeddedness of reproductive technologies in fundamental social processes involving gender, class, political economy, and moral contestation. From family homes through clinics and hospitals to laboratories and disability settings, this incisive study takes the reader across a huge landscape of people and power participating in technological transformation in America. A richly rewarding read!.

--Arthur Kleinman, M.D., Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology, Harvard University

If you like to know everything about a subject before making a decision--and you're facing an amnio--you'll get support and information from Testing Women, Testing the Fetus. . . Rapp . . . shares a wide variety of compelling human stories that are rarely told.

--Colorado Parent, Feb. 2000

[A] monumental and challenging study....[a] rigorous illumination of both the scientific and the social practices of amniocentesis. So impressive is this achievement, indeed, that I think it possible to say that Testing Women, Testing the Fetus may provide us with a model of intellectual deportment that anthropologists, genetic counselors, medical professionals, bioethicists, research scientists, and even cultural critics -- yes them too -- will do well to acknowledge and emulate.

--Michael Berube, Tikkun

This is a complicated late-twentieth-century tale in which we never lose sight of the human minds and persons behind it. An account shot through with quite dazzling perceptions of particular, located dilemmas which epitomize the intersections of genetic knowledge, prejudice and diagnosis. With remarkable skill, the author brings each dilemma back to its moment of human impact. A rare book in the field, it documents in vivid detail the complexity of the social circumstances surrounding genetic testing, quite as much as the cultural and technological. This brilliant study has been long awaited--it will exceed expectations.

--Marilyn Strathern, Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University and author of The Gender of the Gift

Rapp's deep analysis is relevant to women of every ethnic, religious and class background and asks the necessary questions preceding each potentially difficult choice.

--Daily News

Routledge Web Site, February, 2002

Pregnancy. For many women it is an exhilarating period of their lives. Having already made the decision to conceive, now women are confronted with a more encumbering choice, one riddled with emotional and moral implications:the option to test the health of their fetus prior to birth. Rayna Rapp, one of the leading feminist anthropologists in the United States, explores the complex and contradictory nature of prenatal diagnosis and its social impact and cultural meaning through the narratives of the people who have experienced it. Rich with the voices and stories of participants, these touching, firsthand accounts examine how women of diverse racial, ethnic, class and religious backgrounds perceive prenatal testing, the most prevalent and routinized of the new reproducing technologies. This Pandora's box of moral issues has prompted complex questions, such as:What do women want and not want from technology in pregnancy? What conditions are "worth" an abortion? How do women receiving a "bad" diagnosis cope with their ultimate decisions? Based on the author's decade of research and her own personal experiences with amniocentesis, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus explores the "geneticization" of family life in all its complexity and diversity.

1. How Methodology Bleeds into Daily Life
2. Accounting for Amniocentesis
3. The Communication of Risk
4. Contested Conceptions and Misconceptions
5. Waiting and Watching
6. The Disabled Fetal Imaginary
7. Refusing
8. Culturing Chromosomes, or What's in the Soup
9. An Error in Cell Division, or the Power of Positive Diagnosis
10. The Unexpected Baby
11. Ending Are Really Beginnings