The rise of the c-section is tied not to maternal or fetal outcomes, but to organizational and legal imperatives. To those ends, a woman’s rights to bodily integrity and decision-making–even the right to refuse surgery–are frequently challenged in childbirth.

Scholars have argued that both husbands and wives are less satisfied if wives outearn their husbands because this violates the norms of the male breadwinner model. Some scholars find support for this hypothesis when studying the division of household work, marital dissolution, or depression, but other scholars do not find clear evidence. This article adds to this literature by asking how people's roles in bringing money into the household (as a primary or secondary earner) affect how they feel about that money itself. Analysis of decades of U.S. data finds a clear and consistent result: individuals-whether men or women, whether committed to the male breadwinner model or not-are all more satisfied with their family's financial situation when they earn more than their spouse. Here, generic social psychological processes (like relative deprivation) appear to trump even powerful worldviews, like the male breadwinner model.

How does the victimization of women’s bodies in medical interactions contribute to their experience of gendered violence? We answer this question by joining sexual assault and birth trauma literatures with the medical sociology conversation on the power of hospitals as organizations and the hierarchy of the doctor-patient relationship to analyze the interviews of 101 women who identify as having experienced a coerced, pressured, or forced labor or birth procedure. We find some respondents analogize their experiences to that of someone who has been sexually assaulted, and they and other respondents describe the aftermath effects in ways similar to those who have been victims of sexual assault. Our research demonstrates that clinicians and hospitals are harming patients, often through the normal application of established hospital protocols and behaviors, when women do not feel involved in decisions about their care.

This paper explores the settlement process of one of the most common home diagnostic tools currently in use, the home pregnancy test. The controversial new device appeared to threaten the jurisdiction of both doctors and Food and Drug Administration regulations, while it aligned with the women's health movement's goals. But this study finds a more nuanced narrative: one of boundaries and positions that at once were blurry, later shifted, and were ultimately aligned without compromising the credibility of doctors or the legal system. To understand this process, the roles of court decisions and regulations are explained by stages of juris-technical accordance. In this case, rather than restricting technological innovation, legal innovation provided pathways for widespread acceptance of the home pregnancy test by various groups. As more tools move from expert users to layperson users, this paper demonstrates the utility of examining existing juris-technical assemblages as we consider the future of self-monitoring and self-diagnosis.

Is the test result positive or negative? Tests that occur in labs and doctors' offices pose specific questions to try to obtain specific information. But what happens in the social world when these tests never see the inside of a lab or doctor's office, and instead they are used in a house, in a Walmart bathroom, or in a dormitory bathroom stall? Putting the diagnosis aside, what does the presence of these tests do to social life? This paper examines one such test, the home pregnancy test, and specifically, its use in contemporary intimate life of people who do not want to be pregnant. Pregnancy tests test for pregnancy. But what else is the pregnancy test putting to the test? To investigate this, I spent 8 years studying American pregnancy tests using a qualitative mixed methods approach. This paper draws on some of my research materials, specifically, 85 life history interviews. Each participant was asked to recall, in full, all of their experiences with home pregnancy tests throughout their lives, resulting in well over 300 narratives of home pregnancy test usage which I qualitatively analyzed. I find that more than just a test for a pregnancy, the use of the home pregnancy test is a test of roles, relationships, and responsibilities in social life. These findings suggest implications for social life as more biomedical tests move out of the purview of the medical establishment. K E Y W O R D S gender, pregnancy, reproduction, test, women | 461 ROBINSON | INTRODUC TI ON"I touched my stomach and said, 'Test' and they understood." Paulette was abroad in Poland. It was a family trip with her elderly grandmother to a homeland Nana had not seen since she fled the Nazis. Paulette described her role in her big, hectic family trip, and the multiple ironies of discovering a possible pregnancy in, of all places, Poland, were not lost on Paulette. They had tried to exterminate her family and lineage, but had narrowly failed, and here she was possibly defying them once again. But front and center in her mind were her intimate relationships. She considered her new boyfriend. "Oh, my God, what if I'm pregnant? We've only been together a short time, like, I don't know what I would do." How would the outcomes of the test affect this new relationship? I had told him before because he was the one who wanted to not use condoms and I was a little apprehensive about it. And I had told him, like, honestly, I don't think I would have an abortion if I got pregnant. Like, I am totally 100 percent in favor of abortion. . . but I'm in an age where I really want children and, like, I just don't think I could do it. Testing herself in the context of her family's trip brought to the fore her relationships with her mother and her mother's mother, Nana: I'm with my entire family-like, Nana, my mom, my two uncles . . . we drove from Warsaw to this small town where my grandmother was born in Poland and then my family erupted into a huge fight that lasted, like, three hours. . . Of course, I'm trying to find a pharmacy on the way and come up wit...