What is it about?
In the UK, fathers from Black and Minority Ethnic backgrounds have multiple pressures to do with resisting racism, countering gender stereotypes of black men, dealing with employment insecurities and struggling with citizenship insecurities. When "invited" to gendered spaces such as ante-natal clinics they therefore have to juggle several forms of "display" to ensure their encounter with the health services runs smoothly.
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Why is it important?
Prenatal screening for genetic condition such as sickle cell are often sold to people on the basis that the services are providing "informed reproductive choice". This article suggests that fathers get caught on a slippery slope in which, in order to be seen to be "doing the right thing" they have to struggle to resist genetic screening, prenatal diagnosis and medical termination of pregnancy that they may not really want
Perspectives
Globally, up to 400,000 people are born with sickle cell disease (SCD) every year. Rather than focus on saving children's lives through new-born screening, some policies emphasize that people living with SCD represent a "burden", and that the way forward is the "prevention" and "control" of SCD through prenatal screening. This article suggests reasons why even the most liberal versions of such prenatal screening policies may be flawed.
Professor Simon M Dyson
De Montfort University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘Talk to Me. There’s Two of Us’: Fathers and Sickle Cell Screening, Sociology, February 2015, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0038038514560261.
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