Added on Historical essay

What Does Responsibility Have to Do with Reproduction?

By Adam Turner

Genetic counseling, as the previous two posts in this series suggest, has a lot to offer for navigating the tricky decisions things like prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis raise. Well, in this post I’d like to make things a little more complicated. Enter the sheer messiness of history. I still believe genetic counseling is the best approach we have right now for helping prospective parents with hard choices, but it has a complicated — and not so distant — past that continues to shape counselors’ ways of interacting with clients.

Read More
Added on Personal Essay

The Blame Game in Autism

The interwebz have been abuzz this week, debating Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s editorial in the New York Times on autism and immune function. Although Velasquez-Manoff is a little late on the autism/immune function thesis (which has been posited in research projects since at least 2005), it’s his use of autism stereotypes and ableist language that put this article on my radar. It’s the assumption that autism is a sign of a broken or damaged child that has made me question both his interpretation of that thesis and the implications for the families of children with autism – and the autists themselves.

Read More
Added on Intimate Politics

Now It’s Everybody’s Fault

By Adam Turner

Welcome to the second in a series of posts discussing genetics, prenatal testing, and genetic counseling. In this post we’ll be thinking about blame and birth atypicality. Earlier this month the New York Times and other news media reported on the findings of a recent study published in the journal Nature. In some cases, the study suggested, the increased genetic mutations found in older men’s sperm could make it more likely their offspring might develop autism or schizophrenia.

Read More
black and white picture, two mothers are learning how to bath their babies in a mother school
Added on Historical essay

Better Babies, Fitter Families, and Toddlers and Tiaras: Eugenics in American History

Once upon a time (about two months ago) a group of academics/activists got together to start Nursing Clio, a collaborative blog project that aimed to engage with historical scholarship as a means to contextualize present-day political, social, and cultural issues surrounding gender and medicine. To be honest with you, dear readers (all 5 of you), in the planning stages I sometimes doubted whether we would have enough present-day material to continue the blog past the first month. What if we ran out of material? What if we said everything we needed to say? I made sure to make a list of emergency blog post ideas just in case we got desperate.

As it turns out, we have never once had to break into the emergency blog post survival kit. Between the North Carolina preacher who invoked the Holocaust in an anti-gay sermon, to the continuing War on Women, to the new movie Hysteria – our gender, medicine, and history cup runneth over, my friends.

Read More

Series

Call for Patreon subscribers. Nursing Clio is part of the Clio Productions, Inc 501(c)3.

When our Patreon gets to $500/month, we’ll be able to compensate our writers. This has been a long-term goal of Nursing Clio; now you can help us reach it! If you enjoy our content, support us and our writers by becoming a member of our Patreon.

Become a member!

Subscribe

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 11.6K other subscribers