The Pregnancy Manifesto: Notes on How to Extract Reproduction from the Petri Dish

Abstract

This article draws on 200 stories of procreation in an effort to revise a key-narrative about how humans come into being in technological societies. Before assigning Emily Martin’s famous article “the egg and the sperm,” I asked Israeli undergraduates to explain to a beloved girl how children come into the world. Their narratives included detailed accounts of sperm-ovum encounters as if envisioned through a microscope; the process of pregnancy was missing from most of the stories. My analysis illuminates the local politics of technologized reproduction underlying the invisibility of women’s procreative labor and suggests an alternative story of procreation as hard work done by women’s bodies within somatic and social environments. The discussion points beyond students’ narratives, at the reluctance of anthropologists of reproduction to take up pregnancy as a unit of social analysis. With the emergence of the new genomic sciences, studies of the political ecology of procreative labor become urgent.

Keywords:

• egg and sperm
• genomic science
• procreative labor
• political ecology
• reproductive technologies

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is deeply grateful to Elly Teman, Eyal Ben-Ari, Don Seeman, Yuval Bdolah and the four anonymous reviewers of Medical Anthropology for their illuminating comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. The challenge of waking sleeping metaphors of egg and sperm has been taken up from the male side of conception (Moore 2007).

2. The expression ‘follicular stigma’ refers, in biomedical literature, to the exit point of the mature egg on the ovary. The choice of a word that signifies a range of meanings, beginning with bodily mark or a wound, as well as negative social marking, is yet another term that calls for reconsideration.

3. Class discussions were conducted in Hebrew. In 2012 I hired a native Arabic-speaking assistant. Counting on her help I suggested that Arab students write their narratives in Arabic. Only one student indeed did so.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tsipy Ivry

Tsipy Ivry is a medical anthropologist working on themes of procreation and reproductive technologies and is the author of Embodying Culture: Pregnancy in Japan and Israel (2010, Rutgers University Press). Since 2006, she has researched rabbinically mediated fertility treatments in Israel. Her current project explores the political ecology of pregnancy in Japan in the aftermath of the March 2011 triple disaster. Ivry is a senior lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Haifa, Israel.