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In the decades following the rise of in vitro fertilization, hundreds of thousands of human embryos have been cryopreserved and ultimately abandoned, raising urgent and largely unresolved ethical questions. What moral responsibilities are owed to these embryonic human lives, and what courses of action remain open to those seeking to act with integrity in the face of this technological legacy? In this work, Irene Alexander offers a careful and rigorous examination of the ethical possibilities surrounding abandoned frozen embryos. Drawing on philosophical reasoning, theological insight, and contemporary bioethical debate, she evaluates a range of proposed responses, including embryo adoption, indefinite cryopreservation, thawing without transfer, and the emerging prospect of artificial wombs. Each option is assessed not only for its practical implications but also for its coherence with a robust account of human dignity and moral responsibility. Rather than offering simplistic solutions, Alexander clarifies the moral principles at stake, illuminating the tensions between compassion, justice, and the limits of technological intervention. She situates the problem within a broader cultural and scientific context, showing how developments in reproductive technology have outpaced the ethical frameworks needed to guide them. Accessible to educated readers while grounded in serious scholarship, this book provides a much-needed framework for thinking clearly about one of the most complex bioethical dilemmas of our time. It will be of particular interest to scholars, students, and practitioners in bioethics, theology, philosophy, and medicine, as well as to anyone seeking to understand the moral contours of life in an age of unprecedented technological power.

Leading gender and science scholar Sarah S. Richardson charts the untold history of the idea that a woman's health and behavior during pregnancy can have long-term effects on her descendants' health and welfare.

The idea that a woman may leave a biological trace on her gestating offspring has long been a commonplace folk intuition and a matter of scientific intrigue, but the form of that idea has changed dramatically over time. Beginning with the advent of modern genetics at the turn of the twentieth century, biomedical scientists dismissed any notion that a mother—except in cases of extreme deprivation or injury—could alter her offspring’s traits. Consensus asserted that a child’s fate was set by a combination of its genes and post-birth upbringing.  

Over the last fifty years, however, this consensus was dismantled, and today, research on the intrauterine environment and its effects on the fetus is emerging as a robust program of study in medicine, public health, psychology, evolutionary biology, and genomics. Collectively, these sciences argue that a woman’s experiences, behaviors, and physiology can have life-altering effects on offspring development. 

Tracing a genealogy of ideas about heredity and maternal-fetal effects, this book offers a critical analysis of conceptual and ethical issues—in particular, the staggering implications for maternal well-being and reproductive autonomy—provoked by the striking rise of epigenetics and fetal origins science in postgenomic biology today.