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This chapter explores the legal challenges that workplace pregnancy posed in the 1970s and 1980s. Debates about workplace pregnancy revived clashes about difference and equality that had vexed the women's movement for decades. Paradoxically, pregnancy, a badge of difference, served as a springboard to advances in equal rights. As that happened, the new direction in pregnancy policy underscored the doom of single-sex protective laws. The most enduring steps in shaping pregnancy policy were the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 (PDA), which barred discrimination against pregnant workers; the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA), which offered up to twelve-week unpaid leaves to employees in larger enterprises for family and medical emergencies; and the Johnson Controls decision of 1991, which barred fetal protection regulations as a form of sex discrimination.

Chapter 5 traces the tactics of anti-abortion activists and their impact on the experience of abortion providers and patients. Already in the 1970s, towns tried to prevent the opening of abortion clinics through building and zoning regulations. Once clinics had opened, demonstrators in front of abortion clinics, intimidated patients and abortion providers, held prayer vigils and harassed patients and staff through sidewalk counselling. The chapter discusses the history and tactics of sidewalk counselling and Crisis Pregnancy Centers and the attempts of abortion providers to defend themselves against anti-abortion activism. Providers’ ability to endure the harassment and continue their work depended in part on their ability to get help from law enforcement. And African American patients and providers also relied on their experiences as civil rights activists when confronting anti-abortion activists. The chapter focuses on the experiences of clinics in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Fargo, North Dakota, and concludes with a discussion of Operation Rescue tactics in Atlanta and Detroit.

The election of the New Labour government in a landslide victory in 1997 marked the end of nearly two decades of Conservative rule. The party was voted into power again in 2001. In May 2005, Labour achieved a historical party first: its third consecutive term in office. Early in its first term, the New Labour government made a reduction in teenage pregnancy one of the foci of its reforming policy programme. Teenage Pregnancy, the seminal policy document that introduced the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (TPS), reflected and embodied New Labour philosophy, with its focus on finding a third way on teenage pregnancy and its recognition of the deleterious effects of social exclusion on the lives of individuals and communities. This chapter discusses the three reasons advanced in Teenage Pregnancy for youthful conceptions, i.e., structural (‘low expectations’), technical/educational (‘ignorance’ about contraception and the reality of parenthood), and social or cultural (‘mixed messages’ about sex and parenthood). These and other features of Teenage Pregnancy are also discussed.

This book explores the representation of teenage pregnancy as a problem in UK and the ways in which policy makers, academics, and the media have responded to it. This book examines who is likely to have a baby as a teenager, the consequences of early motherhood and how teenage pregnancy is dealt with in the media. The main aim of the TPS is to reduce teenage conception rates. However, promoting opportunities for, and offering support to, young mothers is secondary. It is recommended that future policy efforts may be better placed and more effective if they are focused primarily on promoting the well-being of young mothers, and fathers as well, and their children and less on the depiction of teenage pregnancy as a problem.

Judgments about risk of harm raise issues of profound moral significance. This chapter criticizes prevailing assumptions about risk management in pregnancy. While bioethicists tend to focus on beneficence when analyzing issues of risk, beneficence does not exhaust the moral significance of risk and judgments about risk also raise issues of social justice. The chapter begins by highlighting criteria for adequate understanding of social justice as transcending the distribution of harms and benefits standardly thought to constitute justice. The chapter then considers how culture shapes the normative significance of risk: how we think about risk, what measures we feel justified taking to manage risks, whose interests are promoted by various approaches to risk, whom we hold responsible and for what. Moving beyond criticism, reforms of cultural attitudes toward pregnancy and its management are proposed and recent claims that “fetal origins” research provides a basis for such reform are assessed. This chapter argues that recognition of the significance of social determinants of health plays a critical role in transforming the management of risk in pregnancy. Overall, the analysis engages foundational philosophical questions about the nature of social justice in concert with attention to cultural context.

Public and private spheres merged in the FMLN camps, requiring commanders to regulate guerrillas’ family lives as well as military actions. Because men significantly outnumbered women, rules promoting “respect” for women reduced internal conflicts over access to women’s bodies, and maintained the FMLN’s “good guy” image with the civilian population. Women guerrillas welcomed these rules, and the protection they provided from mistreatment or abuse. In contrast, men guerrillas reported that they respected a woman’s relationship with another man, more so than the woman herself. Unlike women, men often dismissed their guerrilla camp relationships as not serious. Ironically, then, the FMLN’s narrative of “respect” did little to challenge traditional gender attitudes. Most women guerrillas became pregnant in the camps, and many used the pregnancy as a reason to demobilize from guerrilla activism, even over the protestations of commanders. Men, in contrast, had no choice but to stay in the guerrillas or defect. Women’s greater flexibility in leaving FMLN camps during the war, in conjunction with men’s lack of commitment to wartime relationships, often left women as single moms, and without the benefits of a “demobilization” package, at the war’s end.

I explore lesbian mothers’ narratives of pregnancy, birth, and adoption in relation to the fertility and adoption industries. I use the stories of these mothers to explore the scaffolding of power regulating motherhood, and the ways that it varies from state to state, as well as the conflictual terrain of public representations of lesbian-headed families. Stratified reproduction between lesbians and heterosexual women, and between lesbians of different races and socioeconomic statuses, fundamentally shaped these mothers’ family-making experiences. Whatever their responses to mainstream expectations regarding motherhood, their family-making practices were articulated and evaluated—by themselves and others in their social worlds—in reference to heteronormative social practices. Whether rejected or embraced, pervasive mainstream representations of motherhood and family shaped responses and social interactions. Laws and policies also shaped the ways that families were formed and understood, yet families carved out creative family structures and understandings of kinship relations.

Chapter 4 reviews the interplay between nutrition and natural selection. Much of the discussion of evolution of the human diet revolves around energetic requirements because the increased demand is easy to identify as brain and body size increase over our lineage. However, it is important to be reminded that nutrients have other roles besides yielding energy, primarily regulatory and structural. These latter functions are especially important from the viewpoint of female pregnancy and child rearing. This incongruence of reproductive demands between the sexes lends to the discussion of the evolution of sexual division of labor in human societies, suggesting that some of the differences in resource acquisition may be related to different nutritional needs.

This chapter investigates the right to survival of a child, focusing on health, nutrition and shelter. The provision of health care services is the responsibility of the State governments. Abortion led by sex determination is totally illegal and a criminal act on the part of the doctor. The parliament of India recently approved the amendments to the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act 1971 and the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulations and Prevention of Misuse) Act 1994. Parliament's approval of these bills is a positive step but it has to be balanced by covering the social and cultural biases against the girl child and enhancing her status. Several childcare programmes for enhancing the health status of children are being enforced. Children are the worst influenced because of lack of housing policy. There is a need to advocate and campaign for a comprehensive people's bill of housing rights with the perspective of child rights.

I first heard of the concept of community schools in 1987 while attending a briefing on a community assessment of the Washington Heights/Inwood neighborhood. The survey had been conducted to help The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) determine what levels of services were needed in the community and whether it made sense for the agency to provide them. At this presentation I was immediately struck by the idea of working in a deep partnership with a public school to improve outcomes for children and their families; this concept of community schools seemed so simple, so fundamental, yet at the same time so powerful that I thought, How could anyone be against this? Armed with this belief, I arrived at Intermediate School (IS) 218 in the summer of 1992 as the community school director of CAS’s first community school. Little did I know that my first full year as director would prove to be the most difficult, overwhelming, and at times downright humbling experience in my career. Having survived those first few years, I now have the luxury of looking back and pinpointing some of the challenges—and there were many. First and foremost, CAS and the school knew that we needed somehow to put into practice the concept of collaboration and partnership, but no one understood what that involved. We all soon realized that we were defining what it meant to be a community school as we went along. Another issue I faced was my relationship with the principal. How was I supposed to interact with him? Was he my boss? Did he have a final say on matters? Who was in charge? And what would happen when we disagreed? Still another challenge was posed by the multiple constituents in the school, from the custodian to the school safety officers, from kitchen personnel to the teachers, students, and their parents. What was my role with respect to them, and what credibility and authority did I have in dealing with all these different groups? In other words, who was I, and why should any of them listen to me? While trying to cope with these questions, I also had to ensure the successful delivery of services to virtually the entire student population (approximately 1,400 students), their families, and neighborhood residents.

This chapter introduces edited extracts from Eliza's Babes: Or the Virgins-Offering (1652), a collection of poems and prose meditations, whose author can be recognised only by the name ‘Eliza’. Eliza's work expands the metaphor that the writing process mirrors the process of giving birth, exploring images of the mystical marriage, conception, labour, and birth in order to explain her authorship of devotional verse. Her work was clearly influenced by other writers of devotional verse, but particularly George Herbert

Childbirth is an essential aspect of motherhood. This chapter therefore continues the examination of women’s relationship with medical professionals by looking into maternity provision and the changing relationship between mothers and the health services between the 1940s and 1990s within the spheres of antenatal care, childbirth and postnatal care. The second half of the twentieth century saw a transformation of maternity care in England with the introduction of the NHS in 1948 offering a free and universal maternity service for the first time. However the period has also been characterised as one of increasing medical intervention with medical professionals seeking to control women’s reproductive capacity. This chapter questions this picture through focusing on women’s own attitudes towards the care they received and how actively they felt they could determine it.

Concerns about increases in young people’s criminality during the Second World War and into the 1960s were accompanied by similar anxieties about sexuality. Both were viewed, by the institutions associated with the state and civil society, as symptoms of a decline in Christian values and moral standards. Teenage sexual ‘precocity’ was seen as a social problem because it was connected in the minds of its critics to increased incidence of venereal disease, a rising ‘tide’ of births outside of marriage (‘illegitimacy’), and cycles of poor parenting (the ‘problem family’). Its implications were viewed as medical as well as moral and, despite the decline of eugenics discourse (which had emphasised racial deterioration), as a threat to national strength. This chapter examines strategies of moral regulation relating to young people including the operation of child protection legislation, the prosecution of boys for criminal offences, and growing concern about teenage pregnancy from the late 1950s onwards.

Until recently, we thought that the placenta would protect the fetus against external hazards and that most birth defects were heritable. But a discovery made in Australia in 1940 showed that German measles infection during early pregnancy could lead to blindness and brain damage in the infant. Thus, a micro-organism (that nobody had seen at the time) could pass from the pregnant woman to her child. In the 1960s, a discovery was made in France, that maternal alcoholism could cause brain damage in the offspring. In both cases, the findings were at first ignored, disbelieved and explained away. But these two insights paved the way for a wider recognition that the fetus shares the mother’s exposure to environmental hazards. We now know that hundreds of industrial chemicals circulate in the fetal blood, thereby reflecting a chemical invasion before the child is born.

This chapter revisits the laws documented in the first chapter and demonstrates that even though they prohibited marriage below certain ages, many children continued to marry, often extralegally. When parents objected to these marriages, as in the case of Susan Hervey to the marriage of her daughter Sarah to Thomas Parton, they may have done so not because their children were too young for marriage (reflecting the growth of age consciousness), but because such a marriage would deprive parents of the labor of their children. When judges decided the cases brought by aggrieved parents, they almost always upheld the marriages so as not to create single, non-virginal girls, some of whom might be pregnant. They also wanted to hold men to the promises they had made to the state regarding the permanence of marriage.

Sexual reproduction may have evolved to address the threat from parasites. There is a broad range of reproductive strategies across species. The investment of males and females in reproduction is very different. Each species has an evolved equilibrium of interests between the sexes, as reflected in patterns of parental investment, mate choice, and social structure. The mammalian reproductive strategy relies on placentation and lactation to provide nutritional support and immune and physical protection to the offspring. The human reproductive strategy includes delayed puberty, few pregnancies, and high parental investment. The menopause is a distinctly human characteristic with several potential evolutionary explanations. Sexual dimorphism in body shape, behavior, and physiology is reflected in the higher risks of morbidity and shorter lifespan of human males. There is a growing mismatch between the evolved rate of ovarian ageing and the trend for women to delay the age of first pregnancy.