Prelims

Half Title Page

Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse

Series Title Page

Emerald Studies in Reproduction, Culture and Society

Series Editors: Petra Nordqvist, Manchester University, UK and Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University, UK

This book series brings together scholars from across the social sciences and humanities who are working in the broad field of human reproduction. Reproduction is a growing field of interest in the United Kingdom and internationally, and this series publishes work from across the lifecycle of reproduction addressing issues such as conception, contraception, abortion, pregnancy, birth, infertility, pre- and post-natal care, pre-natal screen and testing, IVF, prenatal genetic diagnosis, mitochondrial donation, surrogacy, adoption, reproductive donation, family-making and more. Books in this series will focus on the social, cultural, material, legal, historical and political aspects of human reproduction, encouraging work from early career researchers as well as established scholars. The series includes monographs, edited collections and shortform books (between 20 and 50,000 words). Contributors use the latest conceptual, methodological and theoretical developments to enhance and develop current thinking about human reproduction and its significance for understanding wider social practices and processes.

Title Page

Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse: Expanding Reproductive Studies

Edited by

Victoria Boydell

University of Essex, UK

And

Katharine Dow

University of Cambridge, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Editorial matter and selection © 2022 Victoria Boydell and Katharine Dow.

Individual chapters © 2022 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80071-734-3 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-733-6 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-735-0 (Epub)

List of Tables and Figures

About the Contributors

Professor Rene Almeling is Professor of Sociology at Yale University, where she holds courtesy appointments in the Department of American Studies, the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine. She is the author of GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men's Reproductive Health (2020) and Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (2011). With Sebastian Mohr, she co-edited a special issue on ‘Men, Masculinities, and Reproduction’ for NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies (2020).

Dr Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is a Senior Lecturer at the interdisciplinary Centre for Science in Society, Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Trained as a feminist medical anthropologist and STS Scholar, her first project is a book manuscript titled Demographic Desires: Emergency Contraceptive Pills and the (re)Imagined Family Planning Project in Contemporary India. Her research interests are in the following areas: Feminist Medical Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS); Cultural Studies and Media; Reproductive and Contraceptive Justice; Population and Demographic Politics vis-à-vis climate change; Critical Kinship; Ethics and Governance; Regenerative Medicine; Critical Science Communication; Immigrant and Indigenous Relations; and Qualitative Research Methods.

Dr Victoria Boydell is a Lecturer in Global Public Health at the University of Essex and a research fellow at the Global Health Centre, the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research looks at the longer range social and cultural dynamics and rights dimensions around reproductive technologies and health care, particularly contraception. She has spent many years in the non-governmental sector working in research around sexual and reproductive rights, including with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, UNWomen and the World Health Organization. She has published widely in a number of journals including BioSocieties, Ethnos, Journal of Sex Research, BMC Women's Health and the BMC International Journal for Equity in Health.

Dr Nolwenn Bühler is an Anthropologist of biomedicine and health, specialised in gender studies. She currently works as a Senior Researcher at the STSlab (UNIL) and a research manager at Unisanté. Her research explores the contemporary reconfigurations of public health in the era of ‘personalised health’. Since November 2020, she is also leading the project SociocoViD (SNSF-PNR78, Unisanté) and a project on chemical exposure in agriculture (FBM-UNIL (IHM). Initially trained in nursing, she obtained her PhD from the University of Zurich, where she dealt with the production of knowledge on reproductive ageing and the role assisted reproductive technologies play in it. She also explored the ontological and political effects of the medically assisted extension of fertility in Switzerland. Her book When Reproduction Meets Ageing: The Science and Medicine of the Fertility Decline was published in 2021.

Dr Katharine Dow is a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and Deputy Director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge. She specialises in public discourses around reproduction and reproductive technologies and in intersections between reproduction and environmental concerns. She is the author of Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Dr Josie Hamper is a postdoctoral researcher at Queen Mary, University of London. Her work focuses on the personal and social implications of new reproductive technologies. Her postdoctoral research explored patients’ experiences of IVF and their perspectives on the introduction of new biomedical technologies in fertility treatment. This work was funded by the Wellcome Trust. Josie completed her PhD research on women's use of fertility and pregnancy apps in the School of Geography, also at Queen Mary, and has published on reproductive technologies, visual culture, parenting and relatedness.

Professor Sallie Han is Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta. A specialist in the anthropology of reproduction, Professor Han is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Reproduction (Routledge, 2021) and The Anthropology of the Fetus: Culture, Society, and Biology (Berghahn Books, 2018), and the author of Pregnancy in Practice: Expectation and Experience in the Contemporary United States (Berghahn Books, 2013). Other major areas of interest include gender, kinship and care. Her current and recent work includes projects on pregnancy and climate change, and the Academic Carework initiative, which examines the challenges of caregiving while pursuing careers in higher education. Han is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Nicky Hudson is a Medical Sociologist with particular expertise in the social and cultural significance of reproduction, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies. Her work also focuses on the sociology of chronic illness. Uniting these themes is an emphasis on intersectionalities and questions of individual-biomedicine-society relations. She has received funding for her work from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, Foundation for Sociology of Health and Illness and the National Institute for Health Research. She leads the Centre for Reproduction Research, an interdisciplinary centre of expertise dedicated to the production of scholarship on the social, cultural and political aspects of human reproduction based in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at De Montfort University.

Dr Ben Kasstan is a Vice Chancellor's Fellow at the Centre for Health, Law & Society at the University of Bristol and is also affiliated with the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research explores the cultural politics of protection that emerge at the intersection of health, religion and state. Ben's recent monograph Making Bodies Kosher was recently published with Berghahn in their series on Fertility, Reproduction & Sexuality.

Dr Caroline Law is a Senior Research Fellow at Centre for Reproduction Research, De Montfort University. Her research interests include endometriosis, particularly the social and gendered aspects of the condition, the impact on partners and relationships, and advancing healthcare for women. Her work takes an applied focus seeking to advance understanding of the condition and its social and psychological impacts, contribute to healthcare policy and enhance support and information for women and couples. Her other research interests include reproductive timing and ageing, particularly the timing of fatherhood, and men and reproduction; and experiences of in/fertility and reproduction and changing landscape of family formation and reproduction more broadly. She is a sociologist whose work primarily utilises qualitative methods.

Dr Sonja Mackenzie is Associate Professor in the Public Health Program at Santa Clara University, USA. In 2021, Dr Mackenzie was Visiting Scholar with the Department of Sociology in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at Cambridge University. Her scholarship lies at the intersections of public health, sociology and gender and sexuality studies to analyse and intervene in social and structural inequities in health among racial/ethnic and sexual and gender minorities. Her current project examines the structural intimacies of LGBTQ kinship as the conjoining of social structural patterns with intimate lives, building on her 2013 book, Structural Intimacies: Sexual Stories in the Black AIDS Epidemic. She is the author of numerous peer review publications and public scholarship on social structural patterns of the US Black AIDS epidemic and LGBTQ kinship and health.

Dr Rishita Nandagiri is an LSE100 Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is finishing her ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2020–2021) at the LSE's Department of Methodology. Her research focuses on abortion, reproductive (in) justice and reproductive governance in the Global South. She serves on the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population's Abortion Research Panel, and on the editorial advisory board of the journal BMJ Sexual and Reproductive Health.

Professor Susan Pickard is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research interests lie in the fields of ageing, gender, sexuality, health and illness and she has published widely in a number of journals including Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Sociology of Health & Illness and Ageing & Society. Her latest book is Age, Gender and Sexuality Through the Lifecourse: The Girl in Time, published by Routledge.

Dr Ryan Whitacre is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Global Health Centre at the Graduate Institute, and a Visiting Fellow in the Center for Social Medicine at UC Berkeley. Ryan defended his doctorate in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (2018), specialising in the anthropology of clinical research, public health and pharmaceutical markets. Through multidisciplinary enquiry and collaborative research, he aims to sharpen theory in medical anthropology and improve practice in global public health. His work has been supported by a fellowship from the US National Science Foundation, research grants from the UC Berkeley, and project grants from the European Research Council and Swiss National Science Foundation (PI: Nguyen VK).

Dr Lucy van de Wiel is a Lecturer at the Global Health and Social Medicine department at King's College London. She also is a member of the Wellcome-funded Changing In/fertilities network hosted by the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging (NYU Press, 2020).

Dr Amanda Wilson is a Lecturer in Psychology at De Montfort University. She is a public health psychologist, with expertise in engaging men in family planning behaviours. To date she has explored men's engagement from the perspectives of men themselves, health services, nurse practitioners, training manuals, female partners, male contraceptive methods and seminal constructs. She has also used quantitative methods to explore large data sets to explain men's use of vasectomy services, including vasectomy reversals, and to explain men's use of condoms, spermicide and natural family planning. Dr Wilson has further worked with collaborators in China around mental health of second infant delivery and the implementation of the two-child policy, as well as the mediating factors of post-partum depression in both mothers and fathers.

Foreword

There is sometimes a strange moment toward the end of a research project where the main noun, the primary object of one's analysis, begins to shimmer, starts to feel unstable and seems as though it might actually slip out of view completely. This happened to me as I was finishing my most recent book, GUYnecology (2020), a history and sociology of why there has been so little attention to men's reproductive health. As I was writing the conclusion, a phrase I had used throughout the book, and which I've encountered hundreds if not thousands of times in the work of others – ‘reproductive body’ – suddenly seemed vague. More than vague: thoroughly devoid of substantive meaning. What was, and is, a reproductive body? Using ‘a’ as an article instead of ‘the’ in front of reproductive body seems to open up the possibilities a bit, but does not begin to answer crucial questions about which parts of whose bodies would one demarcate as specifically (exclusively?) reproductive?

Reading through this marvelous collection of research essays edited by Vicky Boydell and Katie Dow makes me think that this phenomenon, the feeling of losing one's grasp on precisely the thing you've just spent months or years studying, can happen not only with particular research projects but with entire fields. It appears to be happening at the moment in the social scientific study of reproduction, as scholars train their attention on some of the core terms in the field, raising questions about how they have been defined, what they include and what they do not, and identifying the assumptions on which they are based. Far from cause for concern, I think this process heralds the continuing growth and expansion of a field, and it makes possible exciting new opportunities for thinking about what comes next.

In the Introduction to this volume, Boydell and Dow argue for the integration of research on reproductive technologies, noting that they are defining both ‘reproductive’ and ‘technologies’ in expansive ways. In doing so, they are building on long-standing efforts by anthropologists, sociologists and historians to examine the wide range of social, cultural and historical processes that shape individual experiences of reproduction, which can include pregnancy, birth, contraception, abortion and a wide array of reproductive technologies. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (1991) offered a powerfully generative label for conceptualising these processes – the politics of reproduction – and the subsequent outpouring of research provided the basis for my own working definition of reproduction: ‘the biological and social process of having or not having children’ (Almeling, 2015, p. 430).

Boydell and Dow's integrative framework takes up this approach to reproduction and enlivens it with empirically innovative studies of reproductive technologies. In particular, the essays in this volume illustrate the importance of comparative research, such as comparisons of how individuals experience different kinds of reproductive technologies (Kasstan; Van de Wiel; Whitacre) and comparisons of their experiences at different points in the lifecourse (Nandagiri; Boydell). Indeed, Boydell and Dow's emphasis on temporality ensures that scholars are thinking longitudinally not only about the past and the present (Hudson and Law; Han) but also how reproductive technologies figure into ‘anticipated futures’ (Buhler; Hamper; Pickard). Importantly, this volume expands beyond the experiences of cis-women, the typical population researched by reproductive scholars, to include men's and LGBTQI people's experiences of reproductive technologies (Mackenzie; Wilson; Appleton). And like so many others working in the vibrant politics-of-reproduction tradition, the editors and contributors to this volume emphasise how the inner workings of governments and markets and biomedicine have real consequences for the reproductive aspects of people's everyday lives.

In essence, Boydell and Dow's integrative approach to research on reproductive technologies expands the viewscope well beyond the traditional ‘snapshot’, in which researchers concentrate on a single reproductive technology at a particular point in time and place for one group of people. It makes possible new questions about the relationship between processes that are usually considered somewhat distinct, such as those around contraceptive and conceptive technologies. Going forward, there is an ongoing need to analyse how reproductive technologies and reproductive processes more broadly, from the cellular to the global, are shaped not only by gendered norms and beliefs but also by inequalities rooted in racism and heteronormativity, as well as widely varying levels of economic and educational resources across and within countries (e.g. Briggs, 2018; Roberts, 1997; Ross & Solinger, 2017). In addition to several of the essays in this volume that take an intersectional approach, I would also encourage readers to seek out Natali Valdez and Daisy Deomampo's (2019) excellent special issue of Medical Anthropology on race, racism, and reproduction.

Of course, there will never be one correct, true-through-all-of-history answer to questions such as what is a reproductive body or what is reproduction or what is reproductive justice. Decades of social scientific and humanistic scholarship on science and bodies, and especially research on processes surrounding gender, race, sexuality, ability and their intersections, reveal that definitions, understandings, and experiences of reproductive processes are rooted in particular times and places and approaches, the latter of which can be academic, activist or neither. The impossibility of objectivity is not a fact to mourn, but an invitation to consider the full range of complexities in how knowledge is made and the uses to which it can be put. It is a chance to deepen our understanding of the nouns we work with, to examine the assumptions built into these seemingly straightforward words and an opportunity to use such reflections to ask new questions.

Rene Almeling

New Haven, Connecticut June 2021

Acknowledgements

We are fortunate to be part of this collective and collaborative effort to examine, challenge and reflect on the fact that many people design, imagine and use different technologies throughout their lifecourse, and to promote methodologies aligned with a social and reproductive justice approach. First and foremost, we would like to thank all the contributors for their partnership and their patience in shaping this edited collection over an 18-month period. We are also grateful to the people who participated in the original workshop in Geneva in November 2019 but who were not able to contribute chapters, namely Lisa Harris, Aditya Bharadwaj, Ritu Sadana, Irene Maffi, Sezin Topçu and Marina Plesons. The contributors have been generous with their time and their efforts to think together through the political, social, economic, legal and cultural implications of reproductive technologies as they are developed, distributed, used and imagined. You have all exceeded our expectations for constructive collaboration.

This book would not have been possible without the help of many people. We would like to thank Kim Chadwick who guided us through the publication process and Nicky Hudson and Petra Nordqvist, the series editors, for their encouragement for this project and for enriching our thinking across various drafts. We are grateful to Rene Almeling for enthusiastically agreeing to write the foreword and for her thoughtful reflections.

We are also grateful for our respective host institutions for their ongoing support while we were coordinating this volume: the Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute and the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc), University of Cambridge. We would also like to thank the following for funding support for the co-editors: the Brocher Foundation, University of Cambridge Returning Carers' Scheme and the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award, ‘Changing (In)Fertilities’ (grant 209829/Z/17/Z).