Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception

Sarah Franklin's classic monograph on the development of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) has been updated with two new chapters that reflect on its relevance in the past two decades and provide a 'state-of-the-art review of the field today. The book explores the emergence of commercial IVF in the United Kingdom and its significance in relation to classic anthropological debates about kinship, gender, and the biological facts of parenthood. It documents the unique demands of the IVF technique and how it changes its users in ways they had not anticipated. Franklin argues that such experiences reveal a crucial feature of translational biomedical procedures more widely, that they are 'hope technologies that paradoxically generate new uncertainties and risks in the very space of their supposed resolution.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 244 pages
Publication date: 12 October 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

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 pioneering text was the first to explore the emergence of commercial IVF in the United Kingdom, where the technique was originally developed. During the 1980s, the British Parliament devised a unique system of comprehensive national regulation of assisted reproduction amidst fractious public and media debate over IVF and embryo research. Franklin chronicles these developments and explores their significance in relation to classic anthropological debates about the meanings of kinship, gender, and the biological facts of parenthood. Drawing on extensive personal interviews with women and couples undergoing IVF, as well as ethnographic fieldwork in early IVF clinics, the book explores the unique demands of the IVF technique. In richly detailed chapters, it documents the 'topsy-turvy world of IVF, and how the experience of undergoing IVF changes its users in ways they had not anticipated. Franklin argues that such experiences reveal a crucial feature of translational biomedical procedures more widely – namely, that these are 'hope technologies that paradoxically generate new uncertainties and risks in the process of generating new possibilities for reproduction and family formation.

Weight: 408g
Dimension: 155 x 234 x 19 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032256672
Edition number: 2 ed