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"Extremely well-written, innovative, and timely, Infertility Around the Globe is a definitive work. Together, the authors use infertility as the lens to examine numerous compelling social issues, generating a powerful argument that infertility is a globally significant phenomenon. This volume will attract anthropologists and other social scientists interested in the study of reproduction, as well as anyone interested in gender studies, women's studies, and international health."—Carolyn Sargent, co-editor of Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
"This groundbreaking, interdisciplinary book will change how infertility is theorized and how intervention programs are designed. It will become the primary sourcebook for international and comparative research in a variety of cultural settings. Reading this book was a distinct pleasure."—Lynn Morgan, co-editor of Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions
"A stunning achievement. Through its richly textured ethnographic accounts, this book beautifully explicates the universals and particularities of involuntary childlessness in disparate world regions. It challenges the myopic view that the heartbreak is limited to advanced industrial societies. This book is a much-needed antidote in a field mostly characterized by polemic and untested assumptions."—C. H. Browner, UCLA School of Medicine
"Scholarship on infertility too often has been culture-bound, focusing on Western versions of biosocial reproductive problems and on technological solutions. This innovative volume decenters that perspective, with studies on the ostracism of elder childless men in Kenya, political suspicions of vaccination campaigns in the Cameroons, new reproductive technologies for ultraorthodox use in Israel, and China's emergent eugenics. It enlarges the 'public' in public health."—Rayna Rapp, co-editor of Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction
List of contents
Part I. Discourses and Debates
1. Introduction. Interpreting Infertility: A View from the Social Sciences
Frank van Balen and Marcia C. Inhorn
2. The Uses of a "Disease": Infertility as Rhetorical Vehicle
Margarete Sandelowski and Sheryl de Lacey
3. Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorize Infertility
Charis M. Thompson
4. The Psychologization of Infertility
Frank van Balen
Part II. Gender and Body Politics
5. Infertile Bodies: Medicalization, Metaphor, and Agency
Arthur L. Greil
6. Deciding Whether to Tell Children about Donor Insemination: An Unresolved Question in the United States
Gay Becker
7. Conceiving the Happy Family: Infertility and Marital Politics in Northern Vietnam
Melissa J. Pashigian
8. Positioning Gender Identity in Narratives of Infertility: South Indian Women’s Lives in Context
Catherine Kohler Riessman
9. Childlessness, Adoption, and Milagros de Dios in Costa Rica
Gwynne L. Jenkins with Silvia Vargas Obando and José Badilla Navas
Part III. The Infertility Belt
10. Problematizing Fertility: "Scientific" Accounts and Chadian Women’s Narratives
Lori Leonard
11. Is Infertility an Unrecognized Public Health and Population Problem? The View from the Cameroon Grassfields
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg
12. Infertility and Matrilineality: The Exceptional Case of the Macua of Mozambique
Trudie Gerrits
13. Infertility and Health Care in Countries with Less Resources: Case Studies from Sub-Saharan Africa
Johanne Sundby
Part IV. Globalizing Technologies
14. The "Local" Confronts the "Global": Infertile Bodies and New Reproductive Technologies in Egypt
Marcia C. Inhorn
15. Rabbis and Reproduction: The Uses of New Reproductive Technologies
among Ultraorthodox Jews in Israel
Susan Martha Kahn
16. The Politics of Making Modern Babies in China: Reproductive Technologies and the "New" Eugenics
Lisa Handwerker
17. Conception Politics: Medical Egos, Media Spotlights, and the Contest over Test-Tube Firsts in India
Aditya Bharadwaj
Contributors
Index
About the author
Marcia C. Inhorn is Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education, School of Public Health, International Institute, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her books include Quest for Conception: Gender, Infertility, and Egyptian Medical Traditions (1994) and Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt (1996). She is coeditor of The Anthropology of Infectious Disease: International Health Perspectives (1997). Frank van Balen is Associate Professor of Education and in the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of three books in Dutch on childlessness, infertility, and new reproductive technologies, as well as a large number of articles on these subjects in international journals.
Summary
Examines the global impact of infertility as a major reproductive health issue, one that has profoundly affected the lives of countless women and men. This title investigates the use of reproductive technologies in non-Western countries.
