Pregnancy loss, stigma, irony, and masculinities : Reflections on and future directions for research on religion in the global practice of IVF. Commentary (original) (raw)

2006, Culture Medicine and Psychiatry

This volume represents a watershed in the anthropology of reproduction. Studies of new reproductive technologies have tended to have an overly narrow focus on the medical. For instance, anthropologists reporting from the North have often referred to the ''miracle babies'' that come from the ''medical miracle'' of in vitro fertilization (IVF) without considering the ways in which Christianity may inform the meaning of these ''miracles'' for parents, medical staff, and newspaper reporters. In ''Of Fetuses and Angels'' (1992), I suggested that despite the tendency to assume a rigid separation of science from religion and to study these discursive systems in isolation, people may not experience their lives in this fragmented way, and in fact often actively weave together these domains. The easy, but initially surprising, integration of religious and medical images and beliefs found in narratives of pregnancy loss might, in fact, point to a common feature of everyday life (Layne 1992). I concluded by noting that the tendency in Science and Technology Studies to concentrate on the production of technoscience meant that questions such as how lay people experience the relation of religion and science had not been addressed. We see, with this volume, that this is no longer the case. This volume represents another milestone, too. When I began working in the anthropology of reproduction in the mid-1980s, there were very few studies of the new reproductive technologies outside of the North. This volume presents a theoretically-sophisticated, ethnographically-rich set of case studies which illuminate differences between orthodox dictates and lived religion as interpreted by physicians and their patients in Asia, the Americas, Southern Europe, and the Middle East, and which allow comparisons, not just between Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism, but also within them (for example, differences within Catholicism in Ecuador and Costa Rica, and differences between Sunni and Shi'a Islam). To have reached this point is a real achievement. These essays illuminate a host of ways religion figures in the practice of IVF, including official religious dicta about the acceptability of specific