Book Review: Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era by Natali Valdez

Abstract

Weighing the Future: Race, Science, and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era, by Natali Valdez, reports on a multi-sited ethnography of two large-scale medical trials of pregnant women in the United States and United Kingdom. The book is about many things, among them the limitations of large-scale medical trials, the legacies of systemic oppression within healthcare, and the role of diversity and inclusion re-imagined as equity. The findings of Valdez’s book further shed light on ongoing conversations in academic and scientific research concerning the limitations of diversity and inclusion as currently imagined, the relative shortcomings of qualitative and quantitative data and analysis, parsing the social and the innate, and the separation of agential and systemic mechanisms in social processes.

Keywords: gender; medical trials; bias