| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joan Rothschild. The Dream of the Perfect Child. (Bioethics and the Humanities.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 343. $24.95.

This is a provocative, historically informed inquiry into the effects of prenatal testing on pregnancy and public attitudes toward disability. Joan Rothschild argues that, beginning in the 1970s, women's experience of pregnancy underwent far-reaching transformations as a result of the expanded use of ultrasound, amniocentesis, and genetic testing. Prenatal testing held out to women the prospect of bearing children free from inheritable and congenital diseases, defects, and deformities. Yet far from providing reassurance and increasing maternal control over the birth process, prenatal diagnostic practices had the unintended effect of intensifying pregnant women's anxieties and making the fetus, rather than the mother, the focus of medical attention. Testing fostered the illusion of control, while, generally, the only options parents had were to continue or to terminate a pregnancy. Prenatal testing also carried profound implications for thinking about disabilities and physical imperfections. It inspired efforts to screen not only "at-risk" mothers (usually defined as those over the age of thirty-five or those who had given birth to a child with a disability) but all pregnant women, and it encouraged an attitude among some physicians, genetic counselors, and parents that disabilities, far from being a natural part of human difference, should be avoided at all costs and that imperfect pregnancies should be terminated.

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