1.
The Dream of the Perfect Child
Genetics and medicine: controlling
the hereditary disease
Human rights and Biopolitics
Discussant: Shushan Harutyunyan
17 October, 2012 CEU

2.
Joan Rothschild
 Joan Rothschild, educator and author, is best known
for her work in the field of ―gender and technology.‖
She is author-editor of Machina Ex Dea: Feminist
Perspectives on Technology published in 1983; guest
editor of Technology and Feminism, special issue of
Research in Philosophy and Technology (1993); author
of Teaching Technology from a Feminist Perspective
(1988); and author-editor of Design and Feminism:
Re-Visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things
(1999).
 ―I'm living happily without a car, busily writing, and
enjoying the pleasures and vistas of the city of my
birth. I have a B.A. in English from Cornell
University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics from NYU.
I had an earlier career before academe in print media
at The New York Herald Tribune and Scholastic
Magazines, experience that saved me from the horrors
of academic prose. My books are readable!‖
Information from Amazon.com and from her personal website.

3.
The Dream of the Perfect Child
 Published in spring 2005 by Indiana
University Press, USA.343 pp, her sixth
book
 The culmination of over 15 years of
research, the book places the
contemporary quest for the perfect child
into historical perspective, tracing the
intersection of science, technology, and
medicine with the ideology of human
perfectibility from the Enlightenment to
the present, as genetics, reproductive
technologies, and perfectibility ideology
meet in today’s medical practice‖
Quotation from her biography in institute for advanced studies on science, technology and society (ias-
sts) official website

4.
Mix of history, science and technology
studies, and ethical analysis
 The eugenic agenda of the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth
centuries has been relocated to the private, domesticated space of the
clinic and the discourse of individualized medical decision making, and
thereby strengthened.
 ―The discourse of the perfect child is neither scientific-medical
conspiracy nor male plot." Rather, "technology, medicine, and parental
expectations intersect to distort the desire for normal, healthy babies
into the dream of perfect ones"—a desire that she argues is both
understandable and appropriate (227).
 The first three chapters are an informative and helpful history of the
idea that humans can be perfected through science, medicine, and
social policy. The fourth chapter is a useful primer on genetics and
prenatal diagnostic technologies, which is accessible to a humanities
audience but not overly simplistic.
Source of the information: The Dream of the Perfect Child (review), Rebecca Kukla, Hypatia , Volume 22, Number
4, Fall 2007 http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/hypatia/v022/22.4kukla.pdf

5.
Genetics and ―visionary perfection‖
 Old eugenics movements trying to woo the
medical profession in 1960s. But physicians
sympathetic to eugenics were attached to it as
social movement, rather than as a science.
 Training in genetics and eugenics to be
incorporated into the medical school
curriculum. (Third international congress of
eugenics)
 ―Preventive medicine‖, ―Pre-conceptional care‖
“Your DNA contains
- genetic counseling, use of family the mysteries of
pedigrees, health examination marriage – to many areas of your
life including your
bring human beings to ―visionary perfection‖. medical tendencies”
Photo source and explanation of it from eHow.com

6.
Changes in discourse
 Research in human genetics began to discover
the genetic foundations of some hereditary
diseases
 Physicians become involved in research of
human genetic diseases; medical genetics
becomes a field of its own rights (1950s) which
involves reproductive medicine.
 The discourse would come to reflect changed
balance of private aims, social concerns and
ideology.

7.
―Patient-oriented‖ approach VS societal
eugenic genetic concerns
 In the clinical settings of reproductive medicine, the decision to
bear or not to bear a child with a possible birth defect was
individual, private, involving only the physician and the
parent(s).
 But… when the linkup of medicine and genetics ―finally‖ come
arose out of professional interests of requirements of
physicians themselves
 Yet, in the transition period, as doctors become more involved
with genetics and hereditary diseases and engaged in genetic
consulting, the reformulated eugenic agenda continued to play
a part in the emerging practice of genetically oriented
reproductive medicine.
 When genetic counseling developed into a profession in 1970s
and 80s, it called for a ―non-directive‖ model. Physicians
individual, patient-oriented approach would not be fully
separated from the societal eugenic genetic concerns.

8.
THANK YOU