Declining global male fertility rates has generated increased attention on male fertility in recent years. Simultaneously, individualised responsibility for health has been growing. Fertility and lifestyle have therefore become seemingly intertwined. Esmee Sinead Hanna and Brendan Gough examine men's experiences of fertility and lifestyle practices, exploring personal experiences of the role of lifestyle in the quest for conception as well as the broader promotion of 'lifestyle' within both clinical and online material as a key aspect for 'improving' male fertility. Through the exploration of male fertility and lifestyle factors and their modification we examine the growth of healthism around infertility, the role of neoliberalism within this and how this intersects with masculinity. Using a new notion of liquid masculinity, we explore the fluid nature of societal and personal perspectives on the male infertility experience. In doing so we offer new insights into the now accepted idea that 'sperm' is malleable and that fertility controllable through personal choices, despite their being limited scientific evidence for such claims.

In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. In Parenting for a Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone and Alicia Blum-Ross draw on extensive and diverse qualitative and quantitative research with a range of parents in the UK to reveal how digital technologies characterize parenting in late modernity, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent or support. They chart how parents often enact authority and values through digital technologies since "screen time," games, and social media have become both ways of being together and of setting boundaries. Parenting for a Digital Future moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change.

Prenatal testing for genetic abnormalities has transformed pregnancy and motherhood. Using sociological research, this book analyzes the social-psychological and ethical implications of invasive prenatal testing, particularly CVS and amniocentesis. Among the issues covered are changes in the genetic counseling profession and in client demographics; the challenge of nondirective genetic counseling; decisions on testing and on which test to have; the timing and risks of the procedures; abortion and grief; the ethics of sex selection; potential uses and abuses of genetic knowledge; and policy and ethical implications.

Birth rates are falling and fertility rates are well below replacement levels. At the same time, the economic crisis has forced governments to scale back public spending, reduce child support, and raise the retirement age, causing immense social conflict. Taking a step outside the disciplinary comfort zone, Whither the Child? asks how demography affects individuals and society. What does it feel like to live in a low fertility world? What are the consequences? Is there even a problem - economically, culturally and morally? No other book confronts so many dimensions of the low fertility issue and none engage with the thorny issues of child psychology, parenting, family, and social policy that are tackled head-on here.

The editor of this volume takes on the challenging task of presenting an encompassing view of childbirth in America from an anthropological perspective. The book is indeed comprehensive. . . . Collectively the chapters in Childbirth in America lay out a representative sketch of research problems of interest to sociocultural anthropologists and other social scientists working in the area of reproductive health. A distinct accomplishment is the acknowledgement in some of the chapters that not all American women want the same kind of childbirth care or have the same values and attitudes about pregnancy, birth, and parenting, and that this variation needs addressing in both childbirth policy and practice. American Journal of Physical Anthropology A comprehensive and critical examination of the experience of childbirth in America today, from pregnancy to early postpartum. This book covers many controversial issues in the context of diverse cultural, social, and economic backgrounds, which have arisen as a result of the new technologies and ideologies surrounding pregnancy and birth. Most useful as a text for courses in childbirth education, anthropology of women's health, and anthropology of medicine.

Today, cohabiting relationships account for most births outside marriage. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection draws on a wide range of sources to examine the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600.

The history of Asian immigrants in Canada is more than a century old, and the number of persons of Asian descent has more than doubled over the past fifteen years, yet until now there has been no systematic study of these Asian-born Canadians. Using specifically obtained demographic data from Statistics Canada, Shiva S. Halli has investigated differences in family size among Asian ethnic groups in Canada in order to examine inter-group differences and to pinpoint causes for such variations. The author examines the context of fertility differentials by looking at social, cultural, and historical backgrounds, and attempts to utilize the minority status hypothesis, which was originally applied to ethnic groups in the United States, to explain differences in Asian ethnic fertility in Canada.

A detailed story of how social science contributed to gay rights gains in the courts. For most of American history, public opinion was strongly opposed to gay rights. Marriage equality had negligible public support throughout the 1970s-1980s. Yet, starting in the 1990s, American opinion toward marriage equality changed more than any other attitude in the history of American public opinion. In Rainbow after the Storm, Michael J. Rosenfeld explains how attitudes toward marriage equality changed so much, and how public opinion change drove change at the ballot box and in the courts. As Rosenfeld shows, in three crucial same-sex marriage trials, the supporters and opponents of marriage equality faced off. Rosenfeld describes the struggles of the same-sex couples who, with few resources at their disposal, and against formidable state and religious opponents, sued for the right to marry and eventually won. The first comprehensive analysis of the marriage equality movement in the U.S., The Rainbow after the Storm tells the stories of key individuals, the court battles, and the society-wide explanations for the rapid liberalization of attitudes toward gay rights that made same-sex marriage the law of the U.S. sooner than almost anyone thought was possible.

The expectation for fathers to be more involved with parenting their children and pitching in at home are higher than ever, yet broad social, political, and economic changes have made it more difficult for low-income men to be fathers. In It's a Setup, Timothy Black and Sky Keyes ground a moving and intimate narrative in the political and economic circumstances that shape the lives of low-income fathers. Based on 138 life history interviews, they expose the contradiction that while the norms and expectations of father involvement have changed rapidly within a generation, labor force and state support for fathering on the margins has deteriorated. Tracking these life histories, they move us through the lived experiences of job precarity, welfare cuts, punitive child support courts, public housing neglect, and the criminalization of poverty to demonstrate that without transformative systemic change, individual determination is not enough. Fathers on the social and economic margins are setup to fail.

In this dazzling collection of over 200 photos of pregnant women taken from art libraries, childbirth manuals, maternity ads, contemporary art, and personal albums, the authors explore the paradox between image and reality. The photos illuminate how society creates feminine roles through the institution of pregnancy-and how women resist such roles.

This is a study of the work and life of district midwives from 1948 to 1972 in Nottingham, which was one of the last UK cities to build a central maternity unit. The author statistically examines the outcome of home births in the area, taking into account the Parliamentary Reports of 1992 and 1993 and demonstrating the safety and value to society of district midwives.

Drawing on never before used archival materials, Replacing the Dead exposes the history of Soviet and Russian abortion policy. It is not unusual for nations recovering from wars to incentivize their populations to raise their birthrates. The post-World War II Soviet pronatalism campaign attempted this on an unprecedented scale, aiming to replace a lost population of 27 million. Why, then, did the USSR re-legalize abortion in 1955? Mie Nakachi uses previously hidden archival data to reveal that decisions made by Stalin and Khruschev under the rubric of 'family law' created a society of broken marriages, "fatherless" children, and abortions, each totaling in the tens of millions. The government reversed laws regarding paternal responsibility, thereby encouraging men to impregnate unmarried women and widows, and blocked available contraception, overriding the advice of the medical establishment. Some 8.7 million out-of-wedlock children were born between 1945 and 1955 alone. In the absence of serious commitment to supporting Soviet women who worked full-time, the policy did extensive damage to gender relations and the welfare of women and children. Women, famous cultural figures, and Soviet professionals initiated a movement to improve women's reproductive health and make all children equal. Because Soviet leaders did not allow any major reform, an abortion culture grew among Soviet women and spread throughout the Soviet sphere, including Eastern Europe and China. Based on groundbreaking research, Replacing the Dead traces how the idea of women's right to an abortion emerged from an authoritarian society decades before it did in the West and why it remains the dominant method of birth control in present-day Russia.

This study examines the legal discrimination suffered in the United States by children born out of wedlock. The authors analyze the Supreme Court's equal protection birth status decisions from 1968 to 1992 and, in a case-by-case analysis, trace the development of the Court's rulings, examine the pattern of equal protection tests utilized, and evaluate the consistency of the Court's position. In addition, the work examines the related discrimination suffered by the families of non-marital children, especially single parents and alternative family units, and concludes that it is impossible to gain full equality for children born out of wedlock unless equality is also gained for their family unit. Toward these ends, the authors suggest a feminist jurisprudence as a methodology for addressing the underlying issue at the crux of birth status distinctions.

Women's experience of childbirth in the mid-twentieth century, revealed in their own words. For pregnant women in the 1930s and 1940s Dr. Grantly Dick-Read (1890-1959) proposed natural childbirth as the "normal" way to have babies, making drugs, instruments and hospitalization unnecessary. His book Childbirth withoutFear, first published in 1933, spoke of the joys of natural childbirth; women from around the world wrote long, detailed, and poignant letters in response, describing their own experiences in giving birth. This edited collection of the correspondence affords a rare look at childbirth experiences in the hospitals and birthing centers in post-war America and Britain from the perspective of the patient, as women discuss the way they were viewed bysociety, by hospitals, and by physicians and nurses, and their own feelings on childbirth; overall, the book provides an important opportunity to evaluate the treatment of women in the 1940s and 1950s, the generation who gave birth to the so-called "baby boomers." Professor MARY ALVEY THOMAS teaches at Bentley College, Waltham.

With findings that challenge conventional wisdom, Fertility Change on the American Frontier will interest demographers, sociologists, and historians. Examining the marriage and childbearing behavior of one predominantly L.D.S. (Mormon) population, the book calls into question traditional concepts and methods used to study high fertility populations. Mormons were responsible for the settlement, colonization, and development of one of America's last western frontiers. Availability of detailed information on marriage and childbearing, in a large file of approximately 185,000 family records, makes it possible to study the processes of the decline in fertility more extensively than has ever been done before in a major historical demographic study. The authors examine family formation among cohorts of women born between 1800 and 1899 and contrast two competing explanations of fertility change among Western societies: an adaptation argument versus an innovation argument. They demonstrate that the process of increasing fertility limitation beginning in the later part of the nineteenth century involves more than simply stopping childbearing after a given family size has been achieved. It reflects the adoption of a pattern of child spacing indicating a commitment to family limitation early in the marriage cycle. Clearly we must reexamine earlier studies which assumed that high-fertility populations were not interested in or aware of the possibilities of fertility control. Fertility control can no longer be treated as an innovation of Western industrial societies or as an innovation introduced through national family planning programs. We see that among the Utah frontier population marriage and childbearing represented a rational adaptation to a set of rapidly changing social and economic conditions. Without adequate technologies for family limitation, this population was nevertheless successful in reducing family size quickly and dramatically, once the presumed opportunities of the frontier disappeared. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

In this original and highly accomplished study, first published in 1994, Marie Maclean studies the writings of social rebels and explores the relationship between their personal narratives and illegitimacy. The case studies which Maclean examines fall into four groups: those which stress alternative family structures and 'female genealogies' those which pair female illegitimacy and revolution those which question the deliberate refusal of the name of the father by the legitimate those which study the revenge of genius on the society which excludes it Skilfully interweaving feminist theory, French literary criticism, social and cultural history, deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory, Maclean traces the place of these personal narratives of illegitimacy in history and their use in theory, from Elizabeth I to Freud, Sartre and Derrida. The Name of the Mother will be of vital interest and importance to any student of critical theory, feminist philosophy, French or cultural studies.

Reproduction has entered a new ice age: the ability to cryopreserve reproductive cells, tissue and embryos are fundamentally changing our understanding of what it means to be a reproductive citizen. This book explores the ways in which visions of desirable reproductive futures entangle with advances in freezing technologies, with the authors situating their discussions of cryo-fertility within the Scandinavian region, asking: * How does cryopreservation help mobilize particular understandings of reproductive time, reproductive rights and reproductive autonomy? * What values are embedded within Scandinavian laws that seek to regulate cryo-technologies? * How are frozen states enacted in clinical settings and how do the women and men who freeze imagine the preservation of reproductive parts? These questions demand a collaborative approach. The authors empirically cut across the arenas of bioethics/law, practices/experiences, and culture/commerce in order to pin down often complex and far-reaching answers.

In the contemporary world, the unborn - human embryos and foetuses - are highly public and contested figures. Their visual images appear across a wide range of forums, from YouTube videos to pregnancy handbooks. They have become commercial commodities as part of the IVF industry, reproductive tourism and stem cell research and regenerative medicine. The unborn are the focus of intense debates concerning concepts of personhood and humanness, especially in relation to abortion politics and the use and disposal of embryos created outside the human body. The Social Worlds of the Unborn is the first book-length work to discuss all of these issues and more, drawing on social and cultural theory and research and empirical research to do so. It will be of interest to academics and students in a multitude of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, philosophy, bioethics, gender studies, media and cultural studies and science and technology studies.

What does it mean to have a child born through donor conception? Does it mean different things for heterosexual parents and lesbian parents? What is it like for the 'non-genetic' parent? How do grandparents feel about having a grandchild who is conceived with the help of an egg, sperm or embryo donor? Since 1991 more than 35,000 children have been born in the UK as a result of donor conception. This means that more and more families are facing the issue of incorporating 'relative strangers' into their families.
In this path breaking book, the authors explore the lived reality of donor conception in families by using in-depth interviews with parents and grandparents of donor conceived children. With reproductive medical technologies becoming more accessible, assisted donor conception is raising new and important questions about family life. This book will provide compelling reading for all those interested in the family, kinship, gender and sexuality, new reproductive technologies, and genetics.

"Rooted in historical, site-based, narrative, and political accounts, Full Surrogacy Now is the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for. This kind of gestation depends on realizing the implications of knowing that we all actually, materially, make one another, and that this labor continues to be exploited, extracted, and alienated-unequally-at every turn in Capitalism and Patriarchy. Full of brilliant, generative, and also shamelessly biting critique of both bourgeois and communist tracts, feminist and otherwise, Lewis's voice is unique and bracing. I need it; it fills my whole self with reimagined possibilities for making oddkin who are not property. Lewis set out to write an immoderate, utopian, partisan, anti-authoritarian communist defense of surrogates and surrogacy in ramifying registers of meanings and practices, and she has succeeded. Lewis asks the necessary questions, 'Can we parent politically, hopefully, nonreproductively-in a comradely way?' Can we become full surrogates for and with each other? In a book full of fierce demystifications and sharp dissections of injustice masquerading as humanitarianism, nonetheless Lewis convincingly and radically affirms: 'Everywhere about me, I can see beautiful militants hell-bent on regeneration, not self-replication.'" - Donna Haraway

This book briefly reviews sociological, economic, and demographic literature pertaining to the relationship between income and fertility in developed and developing countries. He presents a conceptual framework to examine how fertility responds to changes in the distribution of household income. The analysis of data from Puerto Rico, Korea, and rural India is carefully executed, and conclusive policy implications are discussed. Originally published in 1979

Growing attention has focused on the education of children in the child welfare system, particularly those in foster care, but ninety-two percent of children in the child welfare system stay with their parents and their educational needs receive little attention. Succeeding Together? is an institutional ethnography that analyses front-line accounts from mothers, teachers, and child welfare workers to explore the educational issues facing abused and neglected children outside of foster care. Kelly Gallagher-Mackay examines the complex policy framework and underlying assumptions that shape the practice of collective responsibility for this vulnerable group, shining a light on the implications of their status in-between private and public responsibility. Gallagher-Mackay breaks down collective responsibility into three areas: surveillance and the duty to report, child welfare's poorly defined responsibility to provide educational supports, and the privatized nature of teachers' professional responsibility for caring. The involvement of child welfare represents a public judgment that there should be strong, proactive, and coordinated intervention to ensure protection and well-being. Succeeding Together? reveals significant shortfalls in coordination and commitment to the well-being of society's most vulnerable.

Based on interviews with pregnant women, this book provides a multi-disciplinary empirical account of pregnant embodiment and how it relates to wider sociological and feminist discourses about gender, bodies, 'fitness', 'fat', celebrity and motherhood.

"[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general."-Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Solola, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their families, and midwives. These incongruous perspectives, in conjunction with the implementation of such policies, threaten to disenfranchise clients from their own cultural understandings of self. The author investigates how these policies need to meld with the everyday lives of these women, and how the failure to do so will lead to a failure to decrease maternal deaths globally. From the Introduction: An unspoken effect of reducing maternal mortality to a medical problem is that life and death become the only outcomes by which pregnancy and birth are understood. The specter of death looms large and limits our full exploration of either our attempts to curb maternal mortality, or the phenomenon itself. Certainly women's survival during childbirth is the ultimate measure of success of our efforts. Yet using pregnancy outcomes and biomedical attendance at birth as the primary feedback on global efforts to make pregnancy safer is misguided.

While much of the world worries about increasing population, this book looks the other way. It highlights the dramatic fall in fertility rates in all regions of the world. Demographers suggest that by 2050 this will lead to population decline. While environmentally this may be welcomed, there may also be negative impacts on our economies: less workers, an increasing number of elderly, and more unwanted childlessness. In this book, key experts untangle the reasons for not having children; international case studies demonstrate that there are similar but also different reasons operating in different areas and psychologists and sociologists explore the possible impact on children, parents and the elderly. Given that fertility trends are not easy to reverse, the book concludes that more needs to be done to maximize the potential of all children; particularly those who have been at the margins of society.