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 detailed 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-sovereigntyand 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.

Despite the extensive debates about new reproductive technologies, there is still little published research on the "social "and "cultural "implications of the new reproductive techniques. Our understanding of how babies are conceived and what it means to be a parent or relative have become more complex.

The authors argue that the neglect of social research into new reproductive technologies has led to a failure to make the necessary provisions for their consequences. The plight of the involuntary childless who, having been helped to conceive, find themselves with three, four or more babies illustrates this point clearly.

Why did Greek society foster social conditions, especially early marriage with its attendant early childbearing, that were known to be dangerous for both mother and child? What were the actual causes of death among women described as dying of childbirth in the Hippocratic "Epidemics"? Why did families choose to portray labor scenes on tombstones when the Greek commemorative tradition otherwise avoided reference to suffering and illness? In "Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece," Nancy Demand offers the first comprehensive exploration of the social and cultural construction of childbirth in ancient Greece.

Reading the ancient evidence in light of feminist theory, the Foucauldian notion of discursively constituted objects, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of the modern Greek village, Demand discusses topics that include midwifery, abortion, attitudes of doctors toward women patients, and the treatment of women generally. For evidence, she relies primarily on the case histories in the "Epidemics" concerning women with complications in pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth. She also draws relevant details from cure records and dedications from healing sanctuaries, labor scenes depicted on tombstones, Aristophanic comedy, andPlatonic philosophy.