Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online最新文献

In France, assisted reproductive technology (ART) is regulated by a ‘law relative to bioethics’ voted by the French Parliament in 1994. This law undergoes regular parliamentary revision (in 2004 and 2011) and is currently under review (2019–2020). The most controversial issue at present is access to ART by lesbian couples and single women. The Catholic Church has taken an active part in these debates, despite the fact that France is a secular state, and religion is barred from interference in government policy. Nonetheless, the Church justifies its participation by presenting itself as a guardian of moral values and as an authority on issues related to the family. The Church’s discourse combines religious and secular arguments that foster what I call an ‘anxious rhetoric’, sometimes shared by other segments of the population. Drawing on an ethnographic survey of public debates that preceded and accompanied the present revision of the bioethics law, this article analyses Catholic arguments regarding the specific controversy of ART for lesbian couples and single women.

Human choice and interventions that could seem to threaten the course of ‘nature’ or ‘chance’ are at the heart of controversies over assisted reproductive technology across Western countries. These debates focus predominately on so-called ‘selective reproductive technology’. While today, the technique of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) raises few political and bioethical debates in France and other Western countries, concerns remain that human intervention might replace ‘natural’ processes, threatening human procreation. These polemics focus on situations that require a decision, notably embryo selection and the fate of spare frozen embryos. The choices involved are induced by the technology and organized by the law. In the French legal system, IVF patients and professionals have the opportunity and, to a certain extent, the responsibility to decide on the status of in-vitro embryos. This article shows that, in these situations, both IVF patients and professionals invoke outside agencies (‘instances tierces’), both to avoid making decisions and to recover a world order in which procreation is not entirely subject to human decision. In short, there is a need to feel that procreation is not entirely dependent on human intervention; that individuals do not decide everything. It appears that the choices that are made, their nature and the type of outside agency that is invoked are highly situated.

This article explores the participation of non-US-resident patients/clients in the US reproductive market, garnering a picture of cross-border reproductive care (CBRC) into the USA by drawing on the existing literature, identifying the frequency of and motivations for such arrangements, the primary sending countries, and the reproductive services sought. I find that although the expense of US CBRC necessarily limits the patient/client pool, it is largely non-economic factors that drive CBRC into the USA. The US CBRC patient/client base, which is diverse in terms of national origin, race and sexual orientation, is recruited by the US fertility industry and drawn to the full range of assisted reproductive technology (ART) services, such as in-vitro fertilization, surrogacy, oocyte donation and preimplantation genetic screening/preimplantation genetic diagnosis, available in the US market which are often restricted or limited in their countries of origin. CBRC patients/clients enjoy the legal clarity for establishing parentage and citizenship for their children available in the USA, as well as what some view as a medically and ethically superior ART market.

YouTube hosts two records of interest for those interested in how human-stem-cell-derived gametes are made: one from the USA and one from France. Human-stem-cell-derived gametes, sometimes called ‘artificial gametes’ or ‘synthetic gametes’, are the result of in-vitro gametogenesis (IVG). IVG is a technology in the making that attempts to create oocytes and spermatozoa from embryonic cells or skin cells. This article presents some elements of these videos in written form, and asks what information is publicly available to ‘think with’, and what is not, when it comes to imagining the future of human reproduction. Focusing on the staging of science, this article argues that these videos represent ways of understanding and interrogating science, and display epistemological performances. The comparison is helpful to analyse how a shared global bioscientific authority is valued in these two locations, pointing at areas 'back stage' that the social sciences can illuminate.

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was developed to allow women/couples at risk of having a child with ‘severe and incurable’ hereditary disease to produce embryos through in-vitro fertilization, followed by implantation of embryos devoid of mutated genes, allowing the birth of children free of the pathology present in the family. This article examines the highly regulated practice of PGD in France, the highly deregulated practice of PGD in the USA and Brazil, and the extensive use of this biomedical technology in Israel, and highlights the ways that distinct national policies produce distinct definitions of risk and different norms, standards and rules. PGD, this article argues, is a situated practice. Shaped to an important extent by legal and economic constraints, it displays the ways that new technologies continuously reframe our definitions of the normal and the pathological.

Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, was born more than 40 years ago in England. For Louise Brown’s infertile mother, Lesley, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was the ‘hope technology’ which allowed her to overcome her tubal infertility after 9 years of heart-breaking involuntary childlessness. Since then, IVF has travelled to diverse global locations, where millions of individuals and couples have embarked on technologically assisted ‘quests for conception’. After 40 years of IVF, where has the quest for conception taken us? This article outlines seven major global trajectories — namely, that the quest for conception has become more: (i) technological, because of a profusion of IVF-based innovations; (ii) masculine, because of men’s eager uptake of intracytoplasmic sperm injection, their own ‘masculine hope technology’; (iii) stratified, due to persistent race- and class-based barriers in IVF access; (iv) transnational, as infertile and other involuntarily childless people search across borders to overcome restrictions in their home countries; (v) selective, as IVF-based reprogenetic technologies eliminate genetic disease while exacerbating sex selection; (vi) moral, as religious sensibilities both accommodate and curtail the possibilities and outcomes of assisted reproductive technology (ART); and (vii) extended, as new cryopreservation technologies prolong the reproductive lifespan and extend reproduction to the transgender community. The article concludes with thoughts on where future quests for conception might take us, and why IVF and other reproductive technologies are ‘good to think with’ in both the anthropology and sociology of reproduction.

We consider the scientific evidence that research on in-vitro development of embryos beyond 14 days is necessary. We then examine potential new developments in the use of stem cells to make embryoids or synthetic human entities with embryo-like features, and consider whether they also require legal control. Next, we consider the arguments advanced against extending the 14-day period during which research on human embryos is currently permitted, and find none of them to be convincing. We end by proposing a new objective limit that could serve as a mechanism for regulating the use of embryos for research in vitro.

Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, was born more than 40 years ago in England. For Louise Brown’s infertile mother, Lesley, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) was the ‘hope technology’ which allowed her to overcome her tubal infertility after 9 years of heart-breaking involuntary childlessness. Since then, IVF has travelled to diverse global locations, where millions of individuals and couples have embarked on technologically assisted ‘quests for conception’. After 40 years of IVF, where has the quest for conception taken us? This article outlines seven major global trajectories — namely, that the quest for conception has become more: (i) technological, because of a profusion of IVF-based innovations; (ii) masculine, because of men’s eager uptake of intracytoplasmic sperm injection, their own ‘masculine hope technology’; (iii) stratified, due to persistent race- and class-based barriers in IVF access; (iv) transnational, as infertile and other involuntarily childless people search across borders to overcome restrictions in their home countries; (v) selective, as IVF-based reprogenetic technologies eliminate genetic disease while exacerbating sex selection; (vi) moral, as religious sensibilities both accommodate and curtail the possibilities and outcomes of assisted reproductive technology (ART); and (vii) extended, as new cryopreservation technologies prolong the reproductive lifespan and extend reproduction to the transgender community. The article concludes with thoughts on where future quests for conception might take us, and why IVF and other reproductive technologies are ‘good to think with’ in both the anthropology and sociology of reproduction.