Product Description: The cryosphere, that region of the world where water is temporarily or permanently frozen, plays a crucial role on our planet. Recent developments in remote sensing techniques, and the acquisition of new data sets, have resulted in significant advances in our understanding of all components of the cryosphere and its processes...read more

The wish for a child runs deep, as does the desire for parenthood. It is a wish that is essential to the continuance of the human species. It derives its motive power from many interrelated sources: psychobiological, sociological, historical. Yet it is a power that is changing hands. A short decade ago, Louise Brown was born. Prior to this event, human beings had begun biological life deep inside a female body. Louise Brown's birth signaled the beginning of a new era: The door to a new biotechnological world was opened, a world of artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, embryo transplants, amniocentesis, gender preselection-procedures imagined but never before realized, leading perhaps to the injection of new genetic material into frozen embryos. Indeed, what had been, since Eve, an exclusively female power and prerogative has now been invaded by 20th-century biotechnology. The womb has been replaced, and sperm and egg can now be joined without love and romance. Change brings with it new questions: A complex inquiry has been generated by issues that are psychological, ethical, moral, biological, sociological, and legal. Simultaneously, and not incidentally or accidentally, gender psychology is in transi­ tion. As we enter an androgynous zone, cultural heroes shift, new couples emerge. Gender roles are redefined, and renegotiated, not without struggle and apprehen­ sion. We are approaching a new frontier-hopeful, self-conscious, and anxious. The possibilities are endless, as are the problems.

Frances Wright was a pioneer in the fight for women's reproductive rights in late-19th century America. She received little support at the time, but laid the foundation for those who followed. Margaret Sanger championed the universal availability of contraception. Betty Friedan founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). This book contains eleven biographies of women who fought for women's reproductive rights and their rights to education about sexuality. Each made a significant contribution to women's emancipation from repressive sexual attitudes and laws.

Study on a village in Jodhpur District, Rajasthan.

New reproductive technologies, such as in vitrio fertilization, have been the subject of intense public discussion and debate worldwide. In addition to difficult ethical, moral, personal and political questions, new technologies of assisted conception also raise novel socio-cultural dilemmas. How are parenthood, kinship and procreation being redefined in the context of new reproductive technologies? Has reproductive choice become part of consumer culture? Embodied Progress offers a unique perspective on these and other cultural dimensions of assisted conception techniques. Based on ethnographic research in Britain, this study foregrounds the experiences of women and couples who undergo IVF, whilst also asking how such experiences may be variously understood.

Product Description: The move from large extended families towards the nuclear family already prevalent in the West is one of the most notable demographic trends of the 20th Century. In exploring this "fertility transition" this volume investigates and explains the impact that changing cultural and moral beliefs have had on fertility practice...read more

Product Description: Liza was a healthy thirty-four-year-old when she discovered she could not carry a baby. Like the one of every six women who hears this news, Liza and her husband, David, despaired that they would never be parents. They both had careers...read more

Papers presented at various seminars held during 1995-1996.

Product Description: In a disturbing behind-the-scenes history of the early achievements of Margaret Sanger's American birth control movement, Carole R. McCann scrutinizes the movement's compromises as well as its successes.

Product Description: This work is a collection of reproductive discourses. The author claims these discourses exist as one of the many sites or technologies through which gender is constructed. The primary narrative focuses on gender and the author argues that within reproductive discourses and practice there are strong narratives of gender - narratives that may be read as representing a "social relation"...read more

Product Description: This research survey looks at the measurable effects of women's education on fertility and female autonomy and reviews the evidence from the developing world that has emerged over the last twenty years.

Product Description: The political hypocrisy and personal horrors of one of the most repressive anti-abortion regimes in history came to the world's attention soon after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Photographs of orphans with vacant eyes, sad faces, and wasted bodies circled the globe, as did alarming maternal mortality statistics and heart-breaking details of a devastating infant AIDS epidemic...read more

Product Description: This book grows out of IRRRAG’s four years of collaborative research and analysis in seven countries: Brazil, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, and the United States. Based on in-depth group and individual interviews with hundreds of women in diverse settings, the book asks when, whether and how grassroots women express a sense of entitlement or self-determination in everyday decisions about childbearing, work, marriage, fertility control and sexual relations...read more

With the rigor of a dedicated scholar and the passion of a committed activist, Nancy Lublin offers a fresh perspective on the ethical dimensions of providing and using reproductive technologies, including contraception, assisted conception, and antenatal and childbirth interventions. Combining feminist philosophy and legal theory, Lublin considers these issues under a single category that she calls 'technological intervention in the womb.' She addresses the positions of technophiles (who advocate acceptance of technological intervention in the womb as a source of liberation), technophobic feminists (who reject artificial invasions as anti-natural and anti-women), and other feminists who have argued that technological intervention in the womb should be legal and available to women because freedom of choice should be gender-neutral. Lublin identifies core principles that are common to a kaleidoscope of feminist theories, and she argues that a materialist feminism provides the most effective framework for establishing public policy and creating social change in the name of gender justice.