Sandra P. Gonzáles-Santos’s A Portrait of Assisted Reproduction in Mexico offers a unique insight into the fast-growing field of assisted reproduction in Mexico. By presenting the sociocultural, political, and economic context in which this field has been developed, the sociologist and science and technology studies scholar draws a lucid and detailed portrait of Mexico’s assisted reproduction (AR) system. The author argues that assisted reproduction was made usable through a transformation of Mexicans’ conceptions of healthcare, reproduction, kinship, and family, AR’s diffusion in diverse Mexican sociocultural contexts, and this diffusion’s intertwining with globalization and neoliberalism. Gonzáles-Santos’s insights result from over ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in fertility clinics, medical conferences, patient groups, and other offline and online spaces in which assisted reproduction is negotiated.
The volume consists of two main parts. After an introductory chapter, the author recounts in Part I the emergence and development of the Mexican system of assisted reproduction. Part II discusses the discourses and images surrounding AR technologies in Mexico.
In the first part, the author explains how Mexico’s AR system expanded to its current size through medical specialization and professionalization and the geographical spread of fertility clinics across states, often in a manner akin to franchising. By looking not only at the fertility clinics but also at the people behind these institutions, Gonzáles-Santos manages to recount Mexico’s AR systems story in an impressively detailed fashion. Her account starts from the most important institution in Mexico’s AR system: the all-male Mexican Association for the Study of Sterility. After its foundation in 1949, the institution went through two epistemic shifts: first, from focusing on sterility to managing reproduction as part of Mexico’s family planning campaigns, and second, from managing population control to addressing involuntary childlessness by offering assisted reproductive technologies. In this section, the author further illustrates the unique features of the Mexican case by observing how the development of the AR system became engendered through the fragmented Mexican healthcare system, which is based on the government-run, social-security, and private-practice subsystems.
The second part of the book covers the period following the birth of the first IVF baby in Mexico in 1988. The author outlines the discursive landscapes around the AR system by discussing events relevant to assisted reproduction, the quantitative expansion of clinics, and the narratives about AR broadcast through the Mexican media. The sociopolitical and moral aspects of AR co-evolved constantly and therefore co-defined the outcomes and possibilities of the AR industry. As the country was “expanding in terms of its economic and cultural borders” (p. 186) through international treaties and memberships in international cooperation groups, the AR system paralleled this by adopting the neoliberal logics of commodification and expanding client acquisition beyond heterosexual married couples. The author explains how AR thus shifted from being a medical procedure for curing medically described conditions to a tool for creating new human beings.
A notable strength of the book is the author’s use of a visual metaphor that accompanies her account of the development of Mexico’s AR system. Her representation of this system as a painted portrait helps the reader to understand the complex AR system more clearly and graphically. Most chapters of the book are rich in detail and require attentive reading. However, the book's lively and often vivid language conveys this complexity of detail accessibly to a wide audience.
Gonzáles-Santos focuses the book on the specificity of the Mexican case study. Mexico provides a salient example of how health and reproduction are increasingly neoliberalized and globalized, so we contend that the book would have been able to make more general claims about the implications of the Mexican case study and thus help broaden understanding of the changing nature of reproductive science, kinship and fragmented health care. We encourage the author to be less modest and not restrict her arguments to Mexico by emphasizing her study’s important contributions to global theoretical and conceptual debates. A further extension to the author’s story of the Mexican AR system could be the broader inclusion of the voices and experiences of the men and women who seek treatment and who donate their gametes. As the author observes, “women’s bodies, histories, and lives are seldom taken into account” (254). Furthermore, an extension would be the increasing targeting of international clients by Mexican fertility clinics, especially in the field of surrogacy.
A Portrait of Assisted Reproduction in Mexico should appeal to many different academic fields. The book is not only a valuable contribution to the currently expanding fields of social studies of reproduction and science and technology studies; it also offers important analysis which allow further understanding of broad questions about reproduction, kinship, globalization and neoliberalization of health and healthcare in such disciplines as gender studies, human geography, sociology, political science, and critical health studies. For anyone interested in reproductive health, Mexican society, or interconnections between neoliberalism, globalization, and healthcare in general, this book is a must-read.