Testing Women, Testing the Fetus : The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (The Anthropology of Everyday Life) (The Anthropology of Everydaylife)
by Rayna Rapp

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Book Reviews of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus : The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (The Anthropology of Everyday Life) (The Anthropology of Everydaylife)

Book Review: Interesting but inconclusive
Summary: 3 Stars

However, that is not what the book is about. The book is supposed to be about the impact that amniocentesis has on women's lives as they are faced with the decision not only to have the test, but what to do with the information they recieve. But Rapp was so intent on characterizing each of her interview subjects by race, occupation (hence class) and gender, that she ultimately separated and categorized her subjects in ways that left the reader hanging. She did not make any definite conclusions about amniocentesis, only that women make decisions about amnio based on values they had before they even got pregnant, possibly due to ethnicity.

If I were pregnant this book wouldn't help me at all in making a decision. But the chapters on how the tests are analyzed are quite interesting, and the chapters on disability and the way we as a society deals with disabled children in an age when it's easy for them never to be born changed the way I think about disability, and for that reason alone I think it should be read.

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