Assisted Reproduction: A gender and humanities perspective

This book is a revised second edition of the one released in 2009. It deals with the experiences of heterosexual couples regarding their own assisted reproduction treatments. It contains reports on the treatments, the representations of couples and doctors, their practices and experiences related to motherhood, fatherhood, filiation, and the place of so-called "reproductive assistance". The theme is entangled in the complex relationships between the human and biological sciences and the values that legitimise interventions produced by scientific and technological development in areas involving decisions about fertility and fecundity. Technologies, interdisciplinary knowledge, gamete donors and recipients, the circulation of wombs and embryos, processes of filiation and adoption, lifestyles and conceptions of family are now engendered as globalised practices. These aspects are connected to new contexts, which are the search for reproductive experiences for men and women who so desire in their different conjugal relationships or outside them.