Conceiving Agency: Reproductive Authority among Haredi Women explores the ways Haredi Jewish women make decisions about their reproductive lives. Although they must contend with interference from doctors, rabbis, and the Israeli government, Haredi women find space for—and insist on—autonomy from them when they make decisions regarding the use of contraceptives, prenatal testing, fetal ultrasounds, and other reproductive practices. Drawing on their experiences of pregnancy, knowledge of cultural norms of reproduction, and theological beliefs, Raucher shows that Haredi women assert that they are in the best position to make decisions about reproduction. Conceiving Agency puts forward a new view of Haredi women acting in ways that challenge male authority and the structural hierarchies of their conservative religious tradition. Raucher asserts that Haredi women's reproductive agency is a demonstration of women's commitment to Haredi life and culture as well as an indication of how they define religious ethics.

Through nostalgic idealizations of motherhood, family, and the home, influential leaders in early twentieth-century America constructed and legitimated a range of reforms that promoted human reproduction. Their pronatalism emerged from a modernist conviction that reproduction and population could be regulated. European countries sought to regulate or encourage reproduction through legislation; America, by contrast, fostered ideological and cultural ideas of pronatalism through what Laura Lovett calls "nostalgic modernism," which romanticized agrarianism and promoted scientific racism and eugenics. Lovett looks closely at the ideologies of five influential American figures: Mary Lease's maternalist agenda, Florence Sherbon's eugenic "fitter families" campaign, George Maxwell's "homecroft" movement of land reclamation and home building, Theodore Roosevelt's campaign for conservation and country life, and Edward Ross's sociological theory of race suicide and social control. Demonstrating the historical circumstances that linked agrarianism, racism, and pronatalism, Lovett shows how reproductive conformity was manufactured, how it was promoted, and why it was coercive. In addition to contributing to scholarship in American history, gender studies, rural studies, and environmental history, Lovett's study sheds light on the rhetoric of "family values" that has regained currency in recent years.

This book is designed to help those who are interested in Christian higher education explore anew the unique features, opportunities, and contemporary challenges of one distinct type of educational institution -- the Christian college. What distinguishes Conceiving the Christian College from the many other books on this subject is its incisive discussion of a set of crucial ideas widely misunderstood in the world of Christian higher education. Now serving in his eleventh year as president of one of the nation's foremost Christian colleges, Duane Litfin is well placed to ask pressing questions regarding faith-based education. What is unique about Christian colleges? What is required to sustain them? How do they maintain their bearing in the tumultuous intellectual seas of the twenty-first century? Litfin's themes are large, but they are meant to refocus the conceptual challenges to Christian education in ways that will strengthen both the academic environment of today's Christian colleges and their impact on culture at large.

Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

Welcomed as liberation and dismissed as exploitation, egg freezing (oocyte cryopreservation) has rapidly become one of the most widely-discussed and influential new reproductive technologies of this century. In Freezing Fertility, Lucy van de Wiel takes us inside the world of fertility preservation—with its egg freezing parties, contested age limits, proactive anticipations and equity investments—and shows how the popularization of egg freezing has profound consequences for the way in which female fertility and reproductive aging are understood, commercialized and politicized. Beyond an individual reproductive choice for people who may want to have children later in life, Freezing Fertility explores how the rise of egg freezing also reveals broader cultural, political and economic negotiations about reproductive politics, gender inequities, age normativities and the financialization of healthcare. Van de Wiel investigates these issues by analyzing a wide range of sources—varying from sparkly online platforms to heart-breaking court cases and intimate autobiographical accounts—that are emblematic of each stage of the egg freezing procedure. By following the egg’s journey, Freezing Fertility examines how contemporary egg freezing practices both reflect broader social, regulatory and economic power asymmetries and repoliticize fertility and aging in ways that affect the public at large. In doing so, the book explores how the possibility of egg freezing shifts our relation to the beginning and end of life.

This collection addresses the world-wide pattern of falling birth rates. Fertility has commonly been treated from a specialized demographic perspective, but there is today widespread dissatisfaction with conventional demographic approaches, which are criticized for neglecting the cultural, social, and political forces that affect reproductive behavior. For their part, anthropologists have only recently begun to apply their characteristic approaches to the study of reproduction. Drawing on new ethnographic and historical research and on a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors to this book indicate some of the ways in which demography might take into account historical processes, political forces, and cultural conceptions.

Explores the debates about new reproductive technologies in Israel and how they fit with Orthodox Jewish laws concerning parentage and Jewish identity.