Kristin Luker

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Kristin Luker (born c. 1946) is Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.[ needs update ] Earlier she was the Doris Stevens Chair of Women's Studies at Princeton University and professor at the University of California, San Diego.

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Luker has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Sociological Research Association, and was invited to the White House by President Bill Clinton to discuss issues of politics and social policy. She has been awarded grants from the Spencer and Ford Foundations, as well as the Commonwealth Fund, and has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Institute of Mental Health. Her interests include sexual and reproductive behavior, gender, and the relationship between gender and the history of the social sciences in the United States and elsewhere. [1]

Luker is the author of five books: Taking Chances: Abortion and the Decision Not to Contracept (1975), Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (1984), Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (1996), When Sex Goes to School (2006) and Salsa Dancing Into the Social Sciences (2008) and many articles in scholarly journals. [1]

Her book Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood received the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism. The book contrasts the worldviews of pro-choice and anti-abortion activists, arguing that the two sides of the debate on abortion are rooted in different sets of values and ideas about women's roles. Her thesis was criticized in the 2010s by political scientist Jon Shields in a retrospective in Contemporary Sociology as well as by the New York Times journalist Ross Douthat. [2] [3] The book also explores the historical connection between the rise of both pro-life and pro-choice sentiments, and the desire on the part of physicians to professionalize their image. She is careful in the book not to reveal her personal position on abortion, but her 1992 article "She's Come To You For An Abortion" in Harper's Magazine reveals that she is pro-choice.

In her book Dubious Conceptions, Luker discusses the evolution of public perceptions about teenage pregnancy during the twentieth century, and argues that teenage pregnancy should be recognized not as a distinct social problem, but as a symptom of the need for better approaches to poverty. The book was named a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year." [1]

Selected publications

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Christianity and abortion has a long and complex history. There is scholarly disagreement on how early Christians felt about abortion. Some scholars have concluded that early Christians took a nuanced stance on what is now called abortion, and that at different and in separate places early Christians have taken different stances. Other scholars have concluded that early Christians considered abortion a sin at all stages; though there is disagreement over their thoughts on what type of sin it was and how grave a sin it was held to be. Some early Christians believed that the embryo did not have a soul from conception, and consequently opinion was divided as to whether early abortion was murder or ethically equivalent to murder. Some early Christian texts nonetheless condemned abortion without distinction: Luker mentions the Didache, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Saint Basil. Early church councils punished women for abortions that were combined with other sexual crimes, as well as makers of abortifacient drugs, but, like some early Church Fathers such as Basil of Caesarea, did not make distinction between "formed" and "unformed" fetuses.

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