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 fieldword 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 very space of their supposed resolution. The final chapter
closely engages with the 'hope technology' concept, as well as the idea
of 'having to try' and uses these frames to link contemporary
reproductive studies to core sociological and anthropological arguments
about economy, society and technology.
In the context of rapid fertility decline and huge growth in the
fertility industry, this volume is even more relevant today than when it
was first published at the dawn of what Franklin calls the era of
'iFertility'. Embodied Progress is an essential read for all social
science academics and students with an interested in the burgeoning new
field of reproductive studies. It is also a valuable resource for
practitioners working in the fields of reproductive health, biomedicine
and policy.
