About this site

Welcome to my site. My friends and I created this to share some of my work and - more importantly - to invite an exchange of ideas.


I've been a sociologist for a long time. and ventured into a number of different fields over the years: birth and midwifery (which I still think of as my home base); the new genetics and reproductive technologies; medical sociology; bioethics; issues in disability; adoption; race; and now food studies too. Some of you might know my work in one of these areas, others in a different area. What would be really interesting would be to have people talk, with each other and with me, across areas. I've tried, with some success over the years, to talk to midwives about genetics; to encourage people who do new reproductive technologies to think about home birth; to have bioethicists pay more attention to what medical sociology can offer; to get people in Food Studies thinking where midwifery issues overlap with their concerns. These are invariably the most fun and stimulating conversations I've ever been a part of. Connecting people, connecting ideas, weaving the webs that pull us together - nothing could make me happier. So this site, a gift from my friends, is my place to do this kind of weaving.


We've grouped my work by area - but please, if you're here because you have gotten anything useful out of my work in one area, do poke around for a minute in another. Bring your insights and wisdom and experience to a new place, a new issue. Let's see what we can weave together.


- Barbara Katz Rothman

My Finnish Fulbright Fantasy

I was honored to be the recipient of the Fulbright-Saastamoinen Foundation Distinguished Chair in Health Sciences 2018-2019.

This Fulbright, as a Distinguished Chair, differs from most -- it is for two separate month-long trips.

The work I did there includes returning to a project I did in the Netherlands on a Fulbright over 20 years ago, interviewing prenatal care providers on their experience and understandings of how prenatal diagnosis affects pregnancy as a social and emotional experience. That work was published as SPOILING THE PREGNANCY (click to read 
here) by the Dutch Midwifery Foundation. I am engaged in ongoing work with Finnish colleagues, particularly Johanna Sarlio-Nieminen and the Kone Foundation, looking at birth care and services in Finland.

Air rights and local politics

Not all of my writing is strictly sociology. I have been working with the Lower East Side “East River Park Action Organization” to save the park running alongside the East River, mostly right along a stretch of public housing, from being razed, from having 1000 trees destroyed, in an ill-advised plan for coastal resiliency.  

Click here to read my op-ed on air rights on Bowery Boogie. (Alternate link here).

My Bowery Boogie op-ed on trees can be read here, and another on the East River Park Resiliency Project is here.

Update: An article in The Village Sun about racist rezoning in NY here.


African American Midwifery: A History and a Lament

It's a great source of pleasure to be working now with my former student, my 'progeny' Keisha Goode. We did a presentation of our joint work at the American Sociological Association meetings in a panel honoring the legacy of Ida B Wells. And we've published this article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. We're also completing a reference book on Pregnancy and Birth in America for ABC-CLIO -- aimed particularly at HS and College undergrads.

Click here to read.