Planning for the Family in Qatar: Religion, Ethics, and the Politics of Assisted Reproduction

ABSTRACT

During research in Qatar with practitioners in assisted reproduction and infertility medicine, I found that across the broad range of views they expressed about their approaches to consulting with patients, there was something shared: that their work with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) entailed taking up moral and ethical positions. In this paper, I draw on interviews with medical professionals to analyse the local moral worlds which shape the practice of assisted reproduction. I provide an analysis of how professionals position themselves amid the complex ethical, moral, and cultural landscape in which ARTs in Qatar are situated. In developing my analysis of how these positionings involve a striving to be virtuous, I contribute to anthropological understandings of the complexities of everyday negotiations of moral practice. This is a process, I argue, that reveals both the interplay between self-construction and professional practice and the multidimensionality of the underexplored ART context in Qatar.

KEYWORDS:

• Family
• Qatar
• moral
• ethical
• reproduction

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Abassi-Shavazi et. al. provide a vivid example of the forms this debate takes when they describe how at a Tehran conference about third party donation one Shi’i Sharia judge from Bahrain openly voiced his opposition to all forms of gamete donation. He argued that that the “permissiveness” of Iranian clergy is an outcome of their unfamiliarity with Arabic and, thus, the core ideas and principles of the original Islamic scriptures (in Arabic) that evidence the immorality of third-party donation (2008:6-7).

2 Clarke, for example, relates how the (late) prominent Lebanese Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah provided different answers to very similar questions about the permissibility of a particular action depending on how the question was narrated and its rigor (2009:70-71).

3 Population estimates of national vs. non-national residents in Qatar vary and are not published officially by the Qatari state. Some estimates indicate that 88% of the resident population is non-national (https://www.migrationpolicy.org/country-resource/qatar) while others place this as high as 93-94% (https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/sep/26/qatar-migrants-how-changed-the-country).

4 In October 2017, during his presentation at an infertility conference sponsored by the newly opened Sidra Hospital for Women and Children held at the Qatar National Convention Center in October 2017, Dr. Mohammad Shahata spoke about this. A Hamad Assisted Conception Unit physician who opened Qatar’s first IVF clinic in the 1980s, he indicated that the fertility decline is related to the decline in polygyny and “changing attitudes about the age of marriage.”

5 Two Fatwas cleared the way for IVF in majority-Sunni societies, one issued in 1980 by Al­-Azhar, a religious institution based in Cairo and a second in 1984 from the Islamic Fikh Council based in Mecca in Saudi Arabia issued in 1984 (see Serour 2008).

6 Staff at the ACU related during interviews that Qatari women over the age of 40 and those who exceed a certain BMI would be ‘less eligible’ for IVF than others. We were told that the queue for Qatari women to see Dr. Shahata, the most preferred physician, was more than a year-long and that the ACU was the same size in 2018 as it was when it opened in 1993 although Qatar’s population has tripled since the 1990s.

7 See Inhorn (2006a) for a history of these rulings.

8 Sex selection for ‘social reasons’ like family balancing is a polarizing issue with varying interpretive framings that cannot be reduced to a set of norms (Clarke 2018). There are discrepancies in the English-language academic scholarship with some reporting that sex selection for family balancing is permitted and others reporting that it is strictly forbidden. I am not aware of a recent fatwa that carries as much weight as the one expressed by the Islamic Fiqh Council held in Mecca, Saudi Arabia in 2007 forbidding the practice of sex selection for social reasons.

9 Here I am referring to discourses around ARTs as being empowering for women in that they not only offer women the possibility of having children who might not be able to otherwise, thereby even ‘saving’ their marriages as some doctors noted, but also, with the case of sex selection for instance “procreative liberty and reproductive choice” (de Melo-Martín 2017).