Technology and Reproduction in a Cooperative Culture

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This project is a Research Planning Grant in the Research Opportunities for Women program at the National Science Foundation. The relatively small amount of funds will allow a researcher from Rice University to do a pilot project in a Basque province of Spain. The research will study how members of a cooperative community, which seeks a fully industrialized life style intermediate between socialist and capitalism, interpret new developments in the technology affecting pregnancy and birth. The biomedical technologies are usually based on a model of gender relations with male physicians dominant over female patients, yet the ideology of the cooperative is that of egalitarianism. The planning grant will allow the PI to visit the field site, establish contacts, and do preliminary interviewing and participant observation to allow her to prepare a full-scale research proposal next year. This research is important because such small pilot projects allow female researchers to prepare more competitive proposals and gain valuable research experience.