My research explores the evolution of medical knowledge and the role of social inequities in shaping clinical practice, bioethics and health policy. Medicine both reflects and reinforces social norms, particularly those norms that contain meaning about morality and responsibility in connection with power, authority and the role of women. My first book documented the history of medical beliefs about maternal drinking and birth outcomes, from nineteenth-century debates about drinking, heredity and eugenics, to the modern diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), which was discovered in 1973. Medical beliefs about alcohol’s effect on offspring have always reflected broader social and moral preoccupations about the proper place of women in society, in addition to concerns about the fitness of future generations. My current research investigates the notion of fetal personhood and its impact on the ethics and practice of obstetrics. I am also currently working on agenda-setting around disease in the U.S. In this project I consider the ways that organized interest groups, health disparities and mass media affect attention to various diseases in the public arena.