Unexpected

Alison Piepmeier was Director and Professor of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. She was the author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism, among other books.

Unexpected is a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book. It engages the porous lessons of disability, debility, death and an enduring love that is at once familial and friendship-centered. Collectively, Alison Piepmeier recruits George Estreich and Rachel Adams into a profound conversation that narrates their experiences of raising children with Down Syndrome as an optic on injustice, advocacy, and social transformation through this most intimate of parent-child relations. -- Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America A thought-provoking book at the value of all human life ... This book should reassure parents who choose to skip genetic testing or decide not to terminate pregnancies after learning their fetus may not be 'normal.' Like Piepmeier and her coauthors, they may well find unexpected joys in happy, loving kids. * Booklist * Asks questions such as, what is the line between illness and disability, and how can a parent deal with uncertainties? ... Shares rarely heard stories from parents and prospective parents who have confronted challenging decisions about a fetus with Down syndrome ... provides insight into a segment of the population rarely explored. * Library Journal *