"Smart, humane, and beautifully written, Saving Babies? is respectful but critical of clinicians, parents, and policymakers as it vividly connects the reader to the human tragedies on the page. Without being maudlin, Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder show us how newborn screening really works. Despite the grim subjects, this profound book is a real treat to read."

Carol A. Heimer | Northwestern University

"Recently expanded newborn screening for genetic disorders aims to enhance one of the triumphs of public health, right up there with vaccination and sanitation. But with millions of babies screened each year in all fifty states, one can lose sight of the fact that each family’s situation is unique and that their perception of the screening program – its benefits, its anxieties, its unpronounceable disease names—will differ. Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder capture those individual stories with sensitivity and compassion. The clinical scenarios they describe, all true, are fascinating and eye-opening, revealing attitudes and responses by both the families and their physicians that are often quite unexpected, but always poignant."

Dr. Wayne W. Grody, M.D., Ph.D. | UCLA School of Medicine

"In this sophisticated and grimly fascinating analysis of the social realities of newborn screening, Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder  describe our brief experience with newborn genetic screening as a natural experiment, a sampling device illuminating the complex relationships among policy, technology, clinicians, medical institutions and medical advocacy—and their very powerful effect on patients and practitioners. As we have become all too well aware, technological progress can create new problems as it promises solutions to old ones. Saving Babies? should be of interest to anyone seriously concerned with health policy and the human condition in the twenty-first century."

Charles Rosenberg | author of Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now

“Well integrated with research in the larger field. Overall, this volume is extremely interesting and worth reading for anyone working in the field of bioethics because it addresses a little-known but very important topic . . . [.] Extremely well-written, extensively researched, easy to read, and eye-opening.”

Ethics & Medicine

“The book is best when it evaluates the social dynamics of patients, parents, and staff (geneticists, dieticians, etc.) and how these dynamics are affected by uncertainties associated with the diagnosis and prognosis of babies with genetically determined metabolic abnormalities. . . . Saving Babies? effectively describes and analyzes the benefits and costs of newborn genetic testing for patients, parents, and clinicians. Recommended.”

Choice

“This is a fine, nuanced, multi-centered study of a complex social issue, and as a methodological model is well worth reading and having our students read.”

Contemporary Sociology

“Sociologist Timmermans and anthropologist Buchbinder have written a smart, sensitive, and compelling ethnography of the consequences of newborn genetic screening for babies who receive a positive test, for their parents, and for the clinicians and clinic staff who treat them. . . . [They] remain sympathetic to the goals of newborn genetic screening, and do not recommend that it be abandoned, but they insist that the entire story, the bad with the good, be taken into account.”

Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences

“Recommended reading.”

Canadian Studies in Population