Joan Rothschild, author, educator, lecturer, is best known as a founder of the field now known as “gender and technology.” Following publication of her ground-breaking Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology in 1983, she authored Teaching Technology from a Feminist Perspective, (1988) guest edited Technology and Feminism, special issue of Research in Philosophy and Technology (1993); and author-edited Design and Feminism: Re-Visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things (1999). She is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and research associate at the Center for Human Environments, The City University of New York Graduate Center.
Published in 2005 by Indiana University Press, The Dream of the Perfect Child is the culmination of over 15 years of research on the topic. It is the first book to put current practices of prenatal diagnosis into historical, cultural, and ideological contexts. Tracing its roots from Enlightenment thought through the biological discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries, The Dream of the Perfect Child shows how the revolution in genetics and the development of sophisticated technologies have refashioned the quest for human perfectibility into the dream of the perfect child. But the dream hides a nightmare and is an illusion. In the privacy of the doctor's office, decisions made by parents and medical professionals reflect deep-seated fears of bearing a child with birth defects. “Healthy” is conflated with “perfect,” and the discourse of the perfect child is born. Having effects far beyond the patient-doctor setting, individual decisions aggregate to certify acceptable fetuses and to label and reject those who are unwanted. These decisions become collective judgments against the imperfect.
The book faults mainstream bioethics for failing to raise relevant questions. Calling on counter-voices from medicine, pregnant women, people with disabilities, and from feminist ethics, The Dream of the Perfect Child reexamines cultural and ideological mindsets. The aim is to enlist technology and science to transform the dream – the dream that every child be born healthy and wanted in all its uniqueness and diversity.
