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‘Who Wants Babies?’ The Social Construction of ‘Instincts’

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Abstract

My concern in this chapter is to draw attention to ‘normal reproduction’ as a socially constructed phenomenon and a sociologically interesting topic of study. I am particularly interested in the ‘vocabularies of motives’ (Mills, 1940) surrounding reproduction and the differential attribution of motives to certain categories of persons.

I would like to thank my colleagues at the MRC Medical Sociology Research Unit for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, and to acknowledge the financial support of the Social Science Research Council for the research project on which it is based.

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© 1991 British Sociological Association

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Macintyre, S. (1991). ‘Who Wants Babies?’ The Social Construction of ‘Instincts’. In: Leonard, D., Allen, S. (eds) Sexual Divisions Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21191-3_1

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