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Rothman, Barbara Katz

Barbara Katz Rothman is a professor of Sociology at the City University of New York, whose work on motherhood crosses the boundaries between several disciplines such as autobiography, memoir, medical sociology, bioethics, gender studies, race relations and adoption, childbirth and midwifery studies, and the sociology of knowledge. Rothman has been one of the advocates of the term mothering in opposition to parenting to describe the “nurturing work of childrearing.” She applies the term to both women and men to represent the kind of work they do and relationship they have with their children. The word denotes work and relationships that are not suitably expressed by the term fathering a child.

Rothman (or Katz Rothman) was awarded her undergraduate and master's degrees by Brooklyn College and her Ph.D. in Sociology by New York University. She has been a staff member at Baruch College and the Graduate School since 1979. In her books, Rothman has often interwoven her own experiences with scholarly observations. For example, her first book In Labor (1982, updated in 2007 as Laboring On, coauthored with Wendy Simonds), stemmed from her decision to give birth to her two first children at home as well as from her interest in midwifery. The Tentative Pregnancy (1986) took a critical stance toward what Rothman labeled “the new technology of reproduction,” whose practices such as surrogacy ultimately turn bodies into commodities and children into products. In a later interview, she finds that surrogacy “cheapens the whole idea of pregnancy, of the relationship women have with their bodies and their children.”

Conflicting Demands of Technology

The new technology of reproduction also encourages the commodification process in natural pregnancies as genetic counseling carries out the purpose of quality control. While Rothman recognized the liberating potential of such new technologies, she asked pointed questions, still relevant in the 21st century, about the use of these technologies as forms of social control. Rothman sees amniocentesis as setting up a contradiction in definitions. Because one of the most likely consequences of a positive amniocentesis is abortion, this technology makes conflicting demands on the mother. On the one hand, it asks her to take care of the baby within her. On the other, it advises her to abort the child with genetic damage. Rothman questions the idea that an abortion for therapeutic reasons should be more socially more acceptable, as it entails the idea that if the fetus is healthy, it is a person; while if it is not healthy, it is just a genetically damaged fetus.

She returned to the analysis of the ways in which new reproductive technologies may be a threat to motherhood in Recreating Motherhood (1989), taking as case studies the Baby M and the Baby Doe controversies. The book suggests that the debates surrounding motherhood, fostered by the introduction of new technologies of reproduction, should be addressed by a new understanding of motherhood, one that challenges patriarchy in favor of a woman-centered and class-sensitive vision. Rothman's argument claims that the rights of mothers, fathers, and children as well as their real needs have been consistently denied because of the reduction of childbirth to a mere clinical event.

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