Principal Investigator Heather Paxson
In the 1990s, Heather Paxson conducted doctoral fieldwork in Athens, Greece, investigating changing ideas about motherhood and fertility control in this child-loving Mediterranean society where the abortion rate is twice the national birth rate. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece argues that Athenian women have incorporated abortion into a moral -- indeed, maternal—framework, in which it may be better to interrupt a pregnancy than to raise a child inadequately. But there is more to the story. Amidst nationalist concern over declining birth rates, the increased consumption of reproductive technologies and consumer goods generates profound ambivalence in Athenians' moral evaluations of abortion, contraception, and in vitro fertilization. At stake are ideas about what it means to be Greek -- or more particularly, a Greek woman or man -- in the modern world.