Löwy Ilana (ed.) Tangled Diagnoses: Prenatal Testing, Women, and Risk

University of Chicago Press, 2018. — 326 p.Tangled Diagnoses examines the multiple consequences of the widespread diffusion of this medical innovation. Prenatal testing, Ilana Löwy argues, has become mainly a risk-management technology — the goal of which is to prevent inborn impairments, ideally through the development of efficient therapies but in practice mainly through the prevention of the birth of children with such impairments. Using scholarship, interviews, and direct observation in France and Brazil of two groups of professionals who play an especially important role in the production of knowledge about fetal development — fetopathologists and clinical geneticists — to expose the real-life dilemmas prenatal testing creates, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the sociopolitical conditions of biomedical innovation, the politics of women’s bodies, disability, and the ethics of modern medicine“To See What Is about to Be Born”
The Liminal Fetus
Genetics, Morphology, and Difficult Diagnoses
Diagnostic Puzzles: Fetopathology in France
Visible Disasters: Fetopathology in Brazil
Balancing Risks: PND and the “Prevention of Disability”
PND, Reproductive Choices, and Care
A Nonscrutinized Diagnosis
Minerva’s Owl and Apollo’s Lyre