This edited volume addresses a wide range of issues that are central to women's participation in human reproduction. Primarily analyses of data and policies in Western Europe, the eleven chapters constitute a diverse collection. Six of the twelve contributed chapters provide an empirical basis for understanding the ways in which reproduction is managed by individuals and families, mediated through state policies and practices. These chapters offer comparisons of state policies on issues from abortion, to adoption, to gene therapy. The remaining chapters discuss conceptual and philosophical issues that arise from New Reproductive Technologies (NRT), from transnational population and demographic issues, and from debates about what constitutes reproductive rights as human rights. But be warned: the title of the volume is somewhat misleading. Although all the contributions are indeed concerned with reproductive issues, not all engage with the rights debate, and some of the chapters make only a brief nod to women or to feminist analysis. Perhaps the ambiguities about women and reproduction and rights are understandable: as the chapters clarify, there are a lot of different rights floating around, and sometimes it is not evident that women are anywhere near the center of the debate.

The chapters in this volume address the tensions implicit in this postmodern reproduction. As Lori Andrews points out in her fine essay “How Is Technology Changing the Meaning of Motherhood for Western Women,”

How states and societies regulate birth rates (addressed in Paloma de Villota's essay) or consecrate nationalist or racist preferences (analyzed in Nidhi Trehan and Isabel Crowhurst's study of the involuntary sterilization of Romani women and of female circumcision/genital mutilation in Europe) add further complications to these tensions. The ongoing debates over how far we should allow NRT to shape our ethical and human choices raise a host of other dilemmas: if we allow preimplantation selection of embryos, for instance, is sex selection ethically acceptable? The answer is complicated: This might eliminate the use of abortions of female fetuses, and it could prevent serious genetic diseases carried by females, but it would also lead to an “unnatural” preponderance of males. Does it matter when sex selection takes place? Several chapters including Andrews', Cirión's analysis of preimplantation diagnosis in Spain, and Widdows' discussion of “genetic relatedness” and rights lay out many of the ethical conundrums raised by NRT and address the diverse answers that are currently promoted by Western states, as well as the ways these policies force a redefining of what “rights” might mean.

Clearly, human reproduction has been revolutionized in the past several decades. The sites of reproduction have moved far beyond the bedroom; participants in reproductive labor include multiple people, engaged in experimental, medical as well as sexual activity; and decisions about whether, when and how to reproduce (or not) have not only multiplied, but extend beyond the long arm of the state to include global exchange and supranational organizations. We have the capacity to freeze sperm, to farm eggs, and to create zygotes in a dish. But one thing has not changed: humans still require the participation of women's bodies, willing or not, in order to reproduce. The primitive reliance on female bodies combined with sophisticated expectations of control and perfectibility create an array of moral questions for individuals, ethical questions for societies and policy challenges for states.

Before getting to these complexities, the early chapters provide useful summaries of various practices of reproduction. Some of the contributions are more successful than others in addressing the rights dimension, but all provide useful analyses. Catherine Kenny's chapter on abortion is a good overview of legal practices and regulations, highlighting the ways in which religious views, when they are adopted by states, trump any reproductive rights women may be assumed to carry in their persons. The chapter on adoption by Fiona MacCallum explores a social work/psychologically based analysis of the challenges encountered by both parents and children in adoptive situations. Although the chapter included a brief discussion of inter-country adoptions of unwanted female babies, it failed to consider the reproductive policies that create an overabundance of unwanted children, especially girls. In this chapter, as in Olga Toth's contribution on teenage pregnancy, there was little feminist interrogation of the conditions underlying the phenomenon. For instance, with regard to adoption, what conditions might push women to find infertility the hardest experience of their lives (48% compared to 15% for men) or to want children more than men do? Toth's chapter too left me wanting more on the debates about providing access to contraceptives and information for teenaged women; a more political feminist analysis might have helped to explain Toth's somewhat surprising conclusion that “there does not seem to be a connection between the teenage birth rate and the presence of government policies to prevent teenage pregnancies” (82).

These quibbles aside, all of the chapters in Women's Reproductive Rights are on the right track. The final section of the book raises important ethical and politically relevant questions about what constitutes choice, about “owning” bodies, and ultimately about what reproductive rights might mean. Sirkku Hellsten's concluding essay addresses these questions by focusing on the ways that the semantics of reproductive rights “may actually create and justify inequality among women globally” (209). Her essay, as well as others in this volume, recognizes that sometimes the contestation over “reproductive rights” is not just a struggle between women and the state, or over ethical values about creating or “improving” life. Sometimes it is also about reproducing cultural, economic and gender hierarchies. This volume is commendable for raising these vexing questions about reproduction, rights and individual choice.