As the court battle over the abortion law in Texas continues, Wellesley College women and gender studies professor Natali Valdez is available for comment on how the situation in Texas reveals how unconstitutional restrictions on individual liberties are permitted, promoted, and legally endorsed when it comes to abortions. In one example, Prof. Valdez highlights the contradictory nature of promoting restrictive reproductive rights while simultaneously rejecting mask mandates amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prof. Valdez is the author of Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era, which will be published by University of California Press this December.
More about the book, from University of California Press: "Epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene expression, has been heralded as one of the most promising new fields of scientific inquiry. Current large-scale studies selectively draw on epigenetics to connect behavioral choices made by pregnant people, such as diet and exercise, to health risks for future generations. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future examines the sociopolitical implications of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and the United Kingdom, illuminating how processes of scientific knowledge production are linked to capitalism, surveillance, and environmental reproduction. Prof. Valdez argues that a focus on individual behavior rather than social environments ignores the vital impacts of systemic racism. The environments we imagine to shape our genes, bodies, and future health are intimately tied to race, gender, and structures of inequality. This groundbreaking book makes the case that science, and how we translate it, is a reproductive project that requires feminist vigilance. Instead of fixating on a future at risk, this book brings attention to the present at stake."
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