ABSTRACT
Major breakthroughs in medical technology affect everyone. The life span has been dramatically extended. The role of medical science is to compress morbidity-to push illness further and further to the end of the life span so that people will enjoy many more years in good health than ever before (Fries, 1980). Although the impact of technology is widely felt across the life span, those technologies that have changed the nature and process of reproduction may be of greatest consequence to women. To take only a few examples, infertile couples now have many more ways to have natural children, genetic testing provides opportunities for families to make decisions about what type of child they will have, and new ways of monitoring fetal development bring more precision to childbearing than ever before.
