The Pregnancy Manifesto: Notes on How to Extract Reproduction from the Petri Dish

Medical Anthropology
Tsipy Ivry

Abstract

This article draws on 200 stories of procreation in an effort to revise a key-narrative about how humans come into being in technological societies. Before assigning Emily Martin's famous article "the egg and the sperm," I asked Israeli undergraduates to explain to a beloved girl how children come into the world. Their narratives included detailed accounts of sperm-ovum encounters as if envisioned through a microscope; the process of pregnancy was missing from most of the stories. My analysis illuminates the local politics of technologized reproduction underlying the invisibility of women's procreative labor and suggests an alternative story of procreation as hard work done by women's bodies within somatic and social environments. The discussion points beyond students' narratives, at the reluctance of anthropologists of reproduction to take up pregnancy as a unit of social analysis. With the emergence of the new genomic sciences, studies of the political ecology of procreative labor become urgent.

References

Jul 15, 1995·BMJ : British Medical Journal·D J Barker
Dec 22, 2004·Sociology of Health & Illness·Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli
Aug 19, 2006·Science·Julie M PinkstonCynthia Kenyon
Apr 29, 2008·Fertility and Sterility·Jean-Christophe Lousse, Jacques Donnez
Jun 24, 2010·Gynecological Endocrinology : the Official Journal of the International Society of Gynecological Endocrinology·Sarah L Berga
Jun 18, 2011·Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics·Asish DasE Mocanu
Jun 1, 2011·BioSocieties·Hannah Landecker
Oct 22, 2013·Reproductive Biomedicine Online·Sarah Franklin

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Citations

Nov 9, 2016·Israel Journal of Health Policy Research·Aviad RazHadar Amir
Jan 1, 2020·Annual Review of Anthropology·Martine LappéHannah Landecker

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