Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Science & Technology — Health Sciences — African and African American Studies

For over 20 years, issues of son preference, sex selective abortion, and female infanticide have loomed large in the mainstream discourse. The culprits in skewed sex ratios in countries such as India, China, and South Korea have generally been styled as patriarchal males who force son preference on oppressed, helpless women. Yet at the same time, biotechnology companies based largely in the US have developed a range of sophisticated (and expensive) pre-conception and pre-implantation techniques for sex selection. Using a language of "family balancing" and "lifestyle sex selection," the companies and their clients assiduously distance themselves from practices such as sex selective abortion. Anti-abortion groups in the US and elsewhere virtually ignore the high-tech companies and their clientele at the same time as these groups oppose such closely related practices (not done for sex selection) as embryonic stem cell research and morning-after pills. Bhatia, a feminist reproductive justice activist and scholar (SUNY Albany), does not shy away from the difficult issues facing those determined to provide a full range of reproductive options to women of all ethnicities and economic levels. Her account is nuanced, engrossing, and accessible to students and professionals alike.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels.

In Lost, Withycombe (history, Univ. of New Mexico) offers compelling insights into how miscarriage was framed, articulated, and understood by women in 19th-century America. The book provides a fascinating discussion of fetal tissue, and how women managed doctors' desires to gather fetal tissue for scientific research. Withycombe argues that by allowing doctors to collect and study fetal tissue, nurses, midwives, female family members, and patients directly impacted the developing field of human embryology. Withycombe's long view, focused on the period from 1820 to 1912, allows for an analysis of how perceptions of pregnancy and miscarriage developed and changed during a crucial period of American history. By exploring women's own writing rather than relying on the medical literature, Withycombe has produced a highly readable and fascinating study that illuminates the complexities not only of miscarriage but of 19th-century medicine, values, and society. Five concise, chronological chapters are accompanied by an introduction and conclusion as well as source notes that provide direction for further study.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.