In Making a Good Life, Katherine Dow illuminates the social impacts of reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) on our everyday responsibilities, relational commitments, moral values, and ethical judgments. Dow elaborates an overarching narrative of a coastal life in Spey Bay, Scotland. When perusing this book, the readers may find themselves immersing in the sounds of ocean waves splashing onto seashores along with dolphins and whales calling in the distance. Despite not being the domain experts or users of ART, people living in Spey Bay provide a unique perspective in studying public understanding of ART. Dow explores the impacts of nature and environment on ethical judgments and reproductive decisions for the everyday people in Spey Bay. This book uses a sociological approach to explore: (1) the underlying mechanism making reproduction a matter of ethical debates, (2) the relationship between reproduction, kinship, and ARTs, (3) the experiences of everyday people toward ART, and (4) the potential implications or contributions of ART on our ethical deliberations in making of a good life.
The author elaborates the importance of the term “making” in studying ethics: “making ethics, making ethical decisions, making a good life … ethics is always being made and always a question of context, and that to understand ethics, we must understand how it is made” (183). This is also the overarching theme of the book, elucidating how people in Spey Bay render their values, responsibilities, and judgments toward reproduction and ART to actualize a positive impact for the environment and future generation. Dow draws substantially on feminist scholars Marilyn Strathern and Sarah Franklin in building her main conceptual framework on merographic connections. This concept manifests the connections between different domains of knowledge that bring to light the public understandings of ethical judgments, moral values, and actualization of reproduction. The author applies this method to understand how people in Spey Bay make a stable environment, reproductive ethics, and a good life based on their connections and associations with the environment and nature.
Dow articulates the impacts of nature, money, and technology on the ethical deliberations in reproduction, kinship, and stable environment of the everyday people in Spey Bay. She encapsulates how middle-class ideals on parenthood and stable environment are driven by the emotional labor in which emotions, self-interest, and ethics are commoditized by capitalist ideologies. Making a Good Life illuminates how nature represents a source of ethical guidance and a normative force that people in Spey Bay rely on to make their ethical deliberations and to make a good life. In the latter chapters of the book, Dow investigates the dystopian views of the public toward ART. The rapid advancement of ART and other technological intervention in reproduction produces a public concern over masculine-biased control over pregnancy, labor, and kinship. This increasing medicalization of birth threatens to denature maternal bonding. As such, Dow elaborates a discussion of how ART, more particularly surrogacy, can assist nature and reproduction as well as challenge, alter, and subvert norms of kinship and reproduction.
While I appreciate Dow’s original work, she appears to subscribe to a dualism between nature and human/culture. In this book, Dow projects nature, through her in-depth descriptions of the ocean and wildlife, not only as a model but also as a mentor and a measure for humans’ ethical deliberations. This principle seems to reinforce the dualisms or boundaries between nature and culture that other scholars have extensively critiqued. Still, Dow's work is remarkable for providing a unique perspective from the everyday people to reflect the public understandings of nature, ethics, and reproduction.
Overall, Making a Good Life substantiates the connections between community values and reproductive ethics, as well as illuminating the impact of money and technology on our personal and professional lives. It manifests the broader social, ethical, cultural and ontological impacts of ART on the public perceptions of reproduction, kinship, conjugal relations, and environment along with future of humanity. While the ethnography of the book might have come to an end, the story of making a good life and making ethics is a constant process.