"I Know It's a Girl, and I Need Your Help To Get It Out of Me."
By Sunita Puri,
Slate
| 08. 02. 2011
"The first thing she said to me was, 'I know it's a girl, and I need your help to get it out of me.' "
Dr. Carpenter's brow furrowed as she told me about the first time she met Priya. Carpenter was an OB-GYN resident at the time. Priya was a recent immigrant from India who worked as a manager in a retail store and had come to the central California clinic on her lunch break. Punctuating her story with glances at her watch, she told Carpenter how, one week earlier, she had used another lunch break to go to a private ultrasound clinic, where she learned that she was pregnant with a girl. With her arms tightly crossed along her abdomen, she explained that her husband and his parents expected a boy, and that Carpenter's help could change her life.
"I have a daughter," Priya said. "I don't need another one."
***
Mara Hvistendahl's new book Unnatural Selectionhas sparked animated conversations about the frightening global consequences of sex selection, or the use of medical technology to ensure the birth...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Jason Kehe, Wired | 04.11.2024
God help the babies! Or, absent God, a fertility startup called Orchid. It offers prospective parents a fantastical choice: Have a regular baby or have an Orchid baby. A regular baby might grow up and get cancer. Or be born...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Eleanor Hayward and Joanna Crawford, The Times | 03.29.2024
Gazing out at the Mediterranean from an idyllic rocky mountaintop, Sophie Hermann announced to her half a million Instagram followers that she had decided to freeze her eggs. Since that post in August, the 37-year-old former Made in Chelsea star...