1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910455400103321

Autore

Daniels Cynthia R

Titolo

At women's expense [[electronic resource] ] : state power and the politics of fetal rights / / Cynthia R. Daniels

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, MA, : Harvard University Press, 1993

ISBN

0-674-03016-8

Descrizione fisica

183 p

Disciplina

342.73/0878

347.302878

Soggetti

Fetus - Legal status, laws, etc - United States

Pregnant women - Legal status, laws, etc - United States

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [151]-173) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Fetal Rights, Gender Difference, and Political Power -- 1 Fetal Animation: The Political and Cultural Emergence of Fetal Rights -- 2 Bodily Integrity and Forced Medical Treatment: The Case of Angela Carder -- 3 From Protecting the Woman to Privileging the Fetus: The Case of Johnson Controls -- 4 The Politics of Vengeance: The Case of Jennifer Johnson -- 5 Toward a New Body Politics -- Notes -- Acknowledgments -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

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 clear 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.