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Starting in 1978, when the first babies conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) were born in the UK and India, assisted reproduction has become a global industry. Contributors to this edited collection reflect on the global dimensions of IVF and assisted reproductive technologies, examining how people have used these technologies to create diverse family forms, including gay, lesbian, and transgender parenthood, as well as complex configurations of genetic, gestational, and social parenthood. The authors examine how IVF and other reproductive technologies have and have not circulated around the globe; how reproductive technologies can be situated historically, nationally, locally, and culturally; and the ways in which culture, practices, regulations, norms, families, and kinship ties may be reinforced or challenged through the use of assisted reproduction.
Bodies and body parts of the dead have long been considered valuable material for use in medical science. Over time and in different places, they have been dissected, autopsied, investigated, harvested for research and therapeutic purposes, collected to turn into museum and other specimens, and then displayed, disposed of, and exchanged. This book examines the history of such activities, from the early nineteenth century through to the present, as they took place in hospitals, universities, workhouses, asylums and museums in England, Australia and elsewhere. Through a series of case studies, the volume reveals the changing scientific, economic and emotional value of corpses and their contested place in medical science.
An inclusive and accessible resource on the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality Companion to Sexuality Studies explores the significant theories, concepts, themes, events, and debates of the interdisciplinary study of sexuality in a broad range of cultural, social, and political contexts. Bringing together essays by an international team of experts from diverse academic backgrounds, this comprehensive volume provides original insights and fresh perspectives on the history and institutional regulatory processes that socially construct sex and sexuality and examines the movements for social justice that advance sexual citizenship and reproductive rights. Detailed yet accessible cha...
Transnational movements are more intricate than diasporic conflicts of ‘home and away’. They operate not only as international connections but also transect and disturb national formations. What are the spaces (both physical and temporal) in and around which transnational exchanges occur? Much discussion of the transnational focuses on international movements of law, politics and economics as they relate to Europe and the Americas. This book extends the focus to dynamics across the humanities and social sciences and concentrates on the historical and now growing interactions between India and Australia. Studies come from scholars in both countries, who combine academic depth for students and researchers and writing that is clear and engaging for the general reader.
An eloquent and intimate debut memoir about navigating the gap between expectation and reality in modern motherhood. I Cannot Control Everything Forever is Emily Bloom’s journey towards and through motherhood, a path that has become, for the average woman, laden with data and medical technology. Emily faces decisions regarding genetic testing and diagnosis, technologies that offer the illusion of certainty but carry the weight of hard decisions. Her desire to know more thrusts her back into the history of science, as she traces the discoveries that impacted the modern state of pregnancy and motherhood. With the birth of their daughter, who is diagnosed with congenital deafness and later, T...
Assisted reproductive technology (ART) allows people who are infertile the opportunity to conceive children and form much desired families. Over the past few decades, the number of ART procedures conducted in the United States has steadily increased, in part affected by the growing number of women trying to conceive later in their reproductive lives. This demographic shift in baby making has widened to include a variety of other people who experience social infertility, from single persons to same-sex couples. Media exposure and political attention to the use of ART have aroused public concern and controversy. In Assisted Reproduction, Alexandra E. Sigillo and Monica K. Miller explore how media, personal differences, societal influences, and psychological processes shape community sentiment toward ART and ART-related laws and policies. This book is recommended for students and scholars of psychology, sociology, gender and women’s studies, communication studies, public health, and legal studies.
This new edition of Sarah Franklin’s classic monograph on the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) includes two entirely new chapters reflecting on the relevance of the book’s findings in the context of the past two decades and providing a ‘state-of-the-art’ review of the field today. Over the past 25 years, both the assisted conception industry and the academic field of reproductive studies have grown enormously. IVF, in particular, is belatedly becoming recognised as one of the most influential technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with a far-reaching set of implications that have to date been underestimated, understudied and under-reported. This pioneeri...
Just over fifty years ago on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade assured millions of women that abortion was a protected constitutional right due to a woman’s right to privacy. In the context of the burgeoning women’s rights movement, it seemed like an inalienable victory: women might become equal to men in their right to determine what would happen to their bodies. This was a hard-won fight that reached back to colonial America and slavery, but on June 24, 2022, the decision was shockingly reversed by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. What happened? What transpired socially, politically, legally, in religious insti...
In Making Gaybies Jaya Keaney explores queer family making as a site of racialized intimacy. Drawing on interviews with queer families in Australia, Keaney traces the lived experiences of choice and constraint as these families seek to craft likeness with their future children and tell stories of chosen family made through love. Queer family building often involves multiracial and multicultural encounters, as intending parents take part in the global fertility industry. Keaney follows queer family making through reproductive technologies and highlights the confines of varied transnational reproductive markets and policies as well as changing formations of race, gender, sexuality, and kinship. Whether sharing the story of white gay men choosing Indian and Thai egg donors to make their surrogate-born children’s ethnicities visually distinct from their own or that of an Aboriginal lesbian and her white partner choosing a Cherokee donor from the United States to articulate a global Indigeneity, Keaney foregrounds the entwinement of reproduction, race, and affect. By focusing on queer family making, Keaney demonstrates how reproduction fosters a queer multiracial imaginary of kinship.
Human beings have been producing more twins, triplets, and quadruplets than ever before, due to the expansion of medically assisted conception. This book analyzes the anticipatory regimes of making multiple babies. With archival documents, participant observation, in-depth interviews, and registry data, this book traces the global and local governance of the assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) used to tackle multiple pregnancy since the 1970s, highlighting the early promotion of single embryo transfer in Belgium and Japan and the making of the world's most lenient guidelines in Taiwan.