'Pioneer' Doctors, 'Desperate' Parents: The Politics of IVF and Other Reproductive Technologies

How are new biological technologies contested and normalised? How is reproductive knowledge politically framed, controlled and circulated? What effect do processes such as IVF have on the boundaries between biology and technology? In our first reading lunch of the term, we would like to invite you to join us in considering changing narratives of IVF and other reproductive technologies since the 1970s.

The group will meet in week 8 at 15:00 on Monday 18 November, in the Ramphal CHM Hub R2.15. The first reading is a recent article by Katherine Dow on ITV’s documentary coverage of the world’s first ‘test tube baby’. The second reading is taken from Sarah Franklin’s Biological Relatives, an anthropological and historical study, which analyses cultural models of natural and technological progress in the context of parliamentary debates on human fertilisation and embryology.

A light lunch will be provided, so please RSVP if you intend on coming.

Readings (PDFs attached)

Katherine Dow, ‘Looking into the Test Tube: The Birth of IVF on British Television’ Medical History, 63 (2019), 189 – 208. Reading 1

Sarah Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship (Durham NC, 2013). Reading 2

Best wishes

Daniela Cullum

Stefan Bernhardt-Radu

Ed DeVane