Weighing the Future

"What happens when we recruit maternal bodies that economize predictive risk based on race, class, and obesity? Weighing the Future reveals that although prenatal trials are misaligned, they continue to scaffold scientific knowledge and portent future 'value.' Valdez has given us an astounding book that challenges our embrace of epigenetics, urging us to critique how capitalist interests make racialized, classed, and 'nonnormative' pregnant bodies individually accountable for the future."--Dána-Ain Davis, author of Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth "Weighing the Future brilliantly exposes how cutting-edge science fosters the same old racialized narratives of health. Carefully detailed, analytically nuanced, politically engaged, and ethnographically rich, Valdez chronicles how histories of race continue to shape science's views of pregnancy and the pregnant body. A must-read book for our times."--Banu Subramaniam, author of Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversity "Weighing the Future offers a fascinating and provocative account of how the new science of epigenetics has been folded into preexisting paradigms that locate reproductive risk primarily within women's bodies. In one brilliant chapter after another, Natali Valdez demonstrates how 'the environment' became understood as a matter of individual women's behaviors, foreclosing a more capacious, structurally oriented instantiation of epigenetics. A crucial intervention into contemporary debates about reproductive health and medicine, this book is a must-read for scholars, medical researchers, and clinicians."--Rene Almeling, author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health