Reproductive practice

In this Introduction, i will briefly review how quality of life came
to assume such importance in health care and reproductive practice
and policy. We will then discuss some of the conceptual and ethical issues
raised by attempts to measure health-related quality of life and
to use such measures in the evaluation of health care interventions.
Next, we will examine the bearing of these issues on the current rethinking
of disability, a category that has been widely associated with
poor quality of life. We will describe the tension that has arisen between
the emerging understanding of disability as an interaction between
health and nonhealth conditions and environmental factors, and
the effort to systematically measure health-related quality of life. Finally,
wewill preview the discussions of these issues by the contributors to this
volume.