Betty B. Hoskins - Böcker

Women have been the objects of scientific and ethical discussions about reproductive freedom and its control for over a century. And they have increasingly endured experiments on their bodies involving ever more powerful technologies, technologies that until now have been largely generated and socially controlled by men. Here, in this study women themselves raise critical questions bout the ethics, the scientific nature, and the social context of these developments.

Women have been the objects of scientific and ethical discussions about reproductive freedom and its control for over a century. And they have increasingly endured experiments on their bodies involving ever more powerful technologies, technologies that until now have been largely generated and socially controlled by men. Here, in this study women themselves raise critical questions bout the ethics, the scientific nature, and the social context of these developments.

Women most fully experience the consequences of human reproductive technologies. Men who convene to evaluate such technologies discuss "them": the women who must accept, avoid, or even resist these technologies; the women who consume technologies they did not devise; the women who are the objects of policies made by men. So often the input of women is neither sought nor listened to. The privileged insights and perspectives that women bring to the consideration of technologies in human reproduction are the subject of these volumes, which constitute the revised and edited record of a Workshop on "Ethical Issues in Human Reproduction Technology: Analysis by Women" (EIRTAW), held in June, 1979, at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Some 80 members of the workshop, 90 percent of them women (from 24 states), represented diverse occupations and personal histories, different races and classes, varied political commitments. They included doctors, nurses, and scientists, lay midwives, consumer advocates, historians, and sociologists, lawyers, policy analysts, and ethicists. Each session, however, made plain that ethics is an everyday concern for women in general, as well as an academic profession for some.