ABSTRACT
As one of the new reproductive technologies, amniocentesis is rapidly becoming routmized, especially for pregnant women in their mid-thirties and older. Prenatal diagnosis has been evaluated medically, economically, and bioethically. But it knows very little about how pregnant women and their families who use, or might use, this new technology respond to its benefits and burdens. At the sociological level, the labours involved in prenatal diagnosis are women's work. Not only are pregnant women the clients for this new reproductive service, but virtually all the workers in this "industry" are female, as well. Medical geneticists working in this field are disproportionately women. While men predominate on the research frontier of genetic engineering, women find medical genetics to be more hospitable. In the laboratory, genetic technicians peer through microscopes, constructing karyotypes, searching for a typical chromosomal patterns. They do so constrained by a work structure which separates fetal cells from babies, blood samples from pregnant women, diagnoses from family trauma.
