Tagged: reproduction

Gender & Sexuality

Can We Just Say "Menstruation" Please!

  Several years ago, I worked on a project designed to examine how menstruation is socially constructed and how this construction has created social taboos that have impacted American women’s attitudes towards their bodies before, during, and after menstruation.  After speaking with women between the ages of eighteen and sixty, I found women today often feel “dirty,” “gross,” or “unclean” while menstruating.  Although some women also associated menstruation positively with childbirth and motherhood, the majority of women I spoke to...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality

Is Breast Best?

This past September, a new initiative went into effect in NYC. The initiative, called Latch On NYC, is intended to support women’s right to exclusively breastfeed their infants, and to support women in that endeavor. To achieve its goal, the project involves a breastfeeding awareness campaign, and some voluntary limitations on hospitals—specifically, they are to limit new mothers’ access to formula.  The initiative emerges out of an increased understanding of breastfeeding’s benefits to infant health, among other things. Before continuing,...

Gender & Sexuality / Political & Economic Sociology / Science & Technology / Sociology of Culture

On the ethics and consequences of Project Prevention: When sterilization becomes a treatment option

By Rachael Liberman Although the organization started in 1997, a recent BBC News article and Radio 4 interview have drawn attention to the highly controversial Project Prevention, a US-based non-profit that offers sterilization to drug addicts. In exchange for $300, “clients,” as the organization calls them, “consent” to  “long term contraception” or “long term sterilization” in order to prevent them from having children that they are “unable to care for.” According to the “Objective” page of Project Prevention’s website: “The...

Opinion

Virtual Conference Report: Day Five (23 Oct, 2009)

The first week of the conference has come to an end, and the final day has included two exciting papers, as well as a publishing workshop. The first paper entitled ‘Full Disclosure of the “Raw Data” of Research on Humans: Citizens’ Rights, Product Manufacturer’s Obligations and the Quality of the Scientific Database’ was presented by Dennis Mazur (Oregon Health and Sciences University). In his lecture, Mazur highlights the difficult and contentious issues involved in human testing, particularly the tensions between...