Reproductive Technologies as Global Form

Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters

Michi Knecht, Maren Klotz, Stefan Beck

• Publisher: Campus Verlag
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9783593411415
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Seit vor 30 Jahren das erste »Reagenzglas- Baby« der Welt geboren wurde, haben sich In- vitro-Fertilisation (IVF) und andere Technologien »assistierter « Reproduktion weltweit verbreitet. Behandlung Suchende, Spenderinnen von Eizellen, Samenbanken und Ärzte agieren über nationale Grenzen hinweg, nicht selten entlang der Wohlstandsbruchlinien zwischen Ost und West und Nord und Süd. Die Autoren zeichnen in ethnografischen Studien die große Vielfalt lokaler Anwendungen von Reproduktionstechnologien auf vier Kontinenten nach und folgen gleichzeitig den transnationalen Routen des Medizinmarktes. Die Reproduktionsmedizin steht dabei beispielhaft für die biotechnologische Globalisierung. In the thirty-five years since the first "test-tube baby," in-vitro fertilization and other methods of reproductive assistance have become a common aspect of family life and medicine in affluent nations and, increasingly, throughout the world. How do persons seeking treatment, donors, and medical experts make use of these reproductive technologies? How in crossing borders between nations do they manage to evade legal and bioethical regulations? And how do they make sense of these new modes of making kinship against the backdrop of diverse worldviews and social settings? In bringing together a wide array of ethnographic studies this volume offers both a current snapshot of the complexity and diversity of local or national IVF-cultures and of emerging transnational forms of mobility, competition, inequality and collaboration. Reproductive technologies as global form refer to the simultaneity of replicating standards and creating differences, of displacements and reappropriations, raising a plethora of provocative questions for the future.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Introduction
• Five Million Miracle Babies Later: The Biocultural Legacies of IVF
• Localizing In Vitro Fertilization: The Cultural Work of Encounters with Medical Technologies
• National Styles of Reproductive Governance and Global Forms
• Tracing Transnational Scapes of Reproductive Technologies: Emergent Forms and Domains of Regulation
• Transnational Reproductive Mobilities, Materialities, and Agencies
• Notes on Contributors
• Index of Names and Places