基本説明
New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2003. Through primary sources and interviews, Armstrong offers a provocative and detailed analysis of how drinking during pregnancy came to be considered a pervasive social problem.
Full Description
In American society, the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy is considered dangerous, irresponsible and in some cases illegal. Pregnant women who have even a single drink routinely face openly voiced reproach. Yet foetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in infants and children is notoriously difficult to diagnose, and the relationship between alcohol and adverse birth outcomes is riddled with puzzles and paradoxes. Sociologist Elizabeth M. Armstrong uses foetal alcohol syndrome and the problem of drinking during pregnancy to examine the assumed relationship between somatic and social disorder, the ways in which social problems are individualized, and the intertwining of health and morality that characterizes American society. She traces the evolution of medical knowledge about the effects of alcohol on foetal development, from 19th-century debates about drinking and heredity to the modern diagnosis of FAS and its kindred syndromes.
Armstrong argues that issues of race, class and gender have influenced medical findings about alcohol and reproduction and that these findings have always reflected broader social and moral preoccupations and, in particular, concerns about women's roles and place in society, as well as the fitness of future generations. Medical beliefs about drinking during pregnancy have often ignored the poverty, chaos and insufficiency of some women's lives - factors that may be more responsible than alcohol for adverse outcomes in babies and children. Using primary sources and interviews to explore relationships between doctors and patients and women and their unborn children, Armstrong offers a provocative and detailed analysis of how drinking during pregnancy came to be considered a pervasive social problem, despite the uncertainties surrounding the epidemiology and aetiology of foetal alcohol syndrome.
Contents
List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Conceiving Risk
Chapter 2. The "Question of Alcohol and Offspring" in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 3. Diagnosing Moral Disorder
Chapter 4. Charting Uncertainty through Doctors' Lenses
Chapter 5. Discordant Depictions of Risk
Chapter 6. Medical-Moral Authority and the Redefinition of Risk in the Twentieth Century
Chapter 7. Bearing Responsibility
Appendix: Data and Methodology for chapter 5 Analyses
Notes
Index
