Narrated Experiences of Medically Assisted Reproduction in Hungary - Infertility from a Multimethod Perspective (original) (raw)
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In recent years, the issue of reproduction has been increasingly thematized in Hungarian political discourse. This has not only occurred at the discursive level, but the government has also introduced new policies regarding reproduction and family life, thus new regulations have been introduced concerning the medical practice of IVF and other ART which have affected practices associated with infertility. The article aims to discuss the ways that policies and discourses shape the views of women struggling with infertility. The medical and political discourse seems to emphasize the responsibility of women in relation to fertility-related issues, despite the fact that the problem also affects men. Furthermore, with the increased surveillance of women undergoing assisted reproductive treatment, the importance of the latter’s self-reflexivity, discipline, and responsibility is emphasized. To discuss these issues, the article uses a multi-method approach. The primary data source is in-dep...
Systematic inequalities in medically assisted reproduction in Hungary – the patients’ perspective
Proceedings STS Conference Graz 2014
Systematic inequalities in medically assisted reproduction in Hungary – the patients’ perspective Zsófia Bauer Corvinus University of Budapest – Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre for Social Sciences e-mail: bauer.zsofia@tk.mta.hu Tel: +36 20 516 1645 Special Session 1: Social justice and Diversity The proposed paper examines the experiences and interpretations of patients regarding inequalities brought forth by the regulations and practices of medically assisted reproduction in the special Hungarian context. As infertility and involuntary childlessness is globally perceived as a unique form of tragedy and loss, couples are always seeking the newest treatments available to them. Due to the rapid development of new biomedical technologies, prospects have changed for individuals and couples with fertility problems, who now have the options to live with several technologies in the field of medically assisted reproduction. Yet as with most technological innovations the access is limited and certainly unequal. Systematic inequalities of such life-chances culminate in frustrations expressed in detail on online discussion groups. My aim is to highlight these systematic inequalities and exclusions as experienced by the subjects themselves and shed light on infertility treatments from a perspective earlier mostly neglected. Material and economic concerns are often paired with speculations of doctor intent and worry about the growing inequalities within the healthcare system. This unique research design permitted studying the discourse of the participants in a natural, non-controlled environment, where the presence of the researcher had no influence on the results, bypassing problems reported by earlier researches regarding occurring biases with individual or couple interviews.
Games of Life. Czech Reproductive Medicine. Sociological Perspectives
The Games of Life analyses current reproductive medicine in the Czech Republic. It targets biomedicine, as a concrete manifestation of modern society’s normalization of the Western approach to human health and illness by focusing on three specific fields: childbirth, assisted reproduction, and embryo manipulation. All three themes are approached with the concept of biopower as a form of governance and administration of modern populations (Foucault 1999). The objective of the book is to provide a critical sociological analysis of reproductive medicine, as one of the key poles in the current form of biopower (Rabinow, Rose 2003, 2006). The reason for our focus on this area is the relationship between reproductive medicine in the Czech Republic and technology, the commodification of health and illness, and the normative character of reproductive medicine with its consequences in the broader social context. The authors start by filling the gap in critical reflection and thelack of debate of these issues in the Czech professional context, and by understanding the mechanisms reproducing the hegemony of a biomedical approach to human reproduction beyond national borders. They do so in the Games of Life by providing specific fieldwork data from the Czech context. They focus their empirical analysis on the issues of everyday practice in reproductive medicine, such as establishing trust in the process, or on topics channelling and polarizing both professional and public discussions on transforming the practices of Czech hospital birth, or the debate on the status of the embryo as a bio-object. These particular issues have been studied to answer the research questions: How are the borders between normality/legitimacy in the definitions of health and illness negotiated within three specialized fields of reproductive medicine? In what way is trust established within the system of modern reproductive medicine? How are the categories of status, gender, and ethnicity introduced into this process? The book analytically situates Czech reproductive biomedicine within a broader critical approach to biosociality manifested in profound changes in contemporary societies.
‘I was with my wife the entire time.’ Polish men’s narratives of IVF treatment
Reproductive Biomedicine & Society Online, 2016
This paper is an ethnography of Polish fathers whose children were conceived with the use of IVF. Due to the strong position of the Catholic Church in Poland, much hostility is voiced in public debate towards women undergoing this treatment and also towards the children born following treatment. The Church condemns the practice as sinful and suggests that these children might suffer from psychological and genetic diseases, thus that they pose a threat to social and moral order. Nevertheless, 76% of people in Poland agree with the statement that infertile married couples should be allowed access to IVF. This paper examines the male perspective on infertility and its treatment. Men are neglected in the debate on IVF, which focuses on the embryo and the female body. By their own account, men also consider their role to be a supporting one and admit that it is the woman who takes upon herself most of the responsibility for the treatment. Men, like their partners, go through difficult emotions, but unlike their partners, often do not find anybody outside the relationship to share them with. While feeling helpless during the treatment process, they expressed strong emotions when discussing the public debate during the interviews. Many of them used strong, sometimes vulgar language when talking about the public debate, as if they were regaining their agency, by symbolically protecting their families. Finally, my research points to the importance of 'togetherness' for my interlocutors.
The Medicalization of Womanhood – A Hungarian case study
In October 2010, Ágnes Geréb, the main proponent of home birth in Hungary was arrested for medical negligence in assisting home birth. Her legal case earned great media attention and reignited dispute between supporters and non supporters of home birth in Hungary and even abroad. Studying the case of Geréb I will attempt to explore the influencing social factors of the dispute and to understand the periodic re-emergence of this issue. My hypothesis is that the debate on home birth is rooted not only in the medical field, but it is strongly influenced by numerous social factors. The findings of my study in connection with the social factors acting behind the subject may contribute to the solution of the problems around home birth.
The construction of meaning by experts and would-be parents in assisted reproductive technology
2011
This article explores the construction of meaning regarding assisted reproductive technology by legal framers, medical practitioners and would-be parents, through the concept of ecology of knowledge. It is argued that these inter-relationships between experts and lay people can be understood in terms of the formation of a social structure of ecology of knowledge, which depends on local and emotional knowledge co-produced by medical doctors, jurists and lay people in dynamic ways without compromising the autonomy of medical, legal and lay knowledge and skills. The assessment of the benefits and risks of assisted reproductive technology partially represents negotiations of knowledge between these social and professional groups, aiming to reproduce existing relations and practices, particularly the social power of medicine and technology, the dominant perceptions about women’s and men’s bodies and the geneticisation of genealogy. These negotiations of knowledge generate new rights, new social actors, new scientific fields and new ways of thinking and talking about individual and institutional responsibilities. Ecology of knowledge comes imbued with hope, trust, power, credibility of institutions and moralisation whereby some citizens’ rights may be weakened.
The aim of this study was to analyse how Finnish infertility physicians talk about children by conducting semi-structured theme interviews. It is of general interest to study how children are represented in the age of assisted reproduction technologies (ARTs), a time when the medical solution to childlessness is preferred over other solutions. Infertility physicians’ discourses on children are of particular interest because they are the ones who try to produce children for couples. An understanding of professional agency is crucial to the understanding of how, why and in what context women make reproductive choices. The physicians considered the rst choice for infertile couples to be to have their own biological child, with the second choice being to have a child with the help of donated Finnish gametes or embryos, and the last option being to adopt a child. The socially most desirable children were considered to be genetically and culturally Finnish, white and newborn, and therefore likely to be more healthy and socially acceptable than the adopted child who represents the Other, the socially less appropriate child. The adopted child is usually of foreign cultural and family origins, non-white, older and likely to temporarily have compromised mental and physical health. In this sense some doctors felt that the use of a donated Finnish embryo in IVF is more secure in terms of a child’s ‘quality’. The physicians’ negative talk about adopted children draws lines between us and strangers, between those outside and inside the borders of nations and families. A key value was the ability to know about and thus control the genetic and social characteristics of the child.
Governing through precarity: The experience of infertile bodies in IVF treatment in Ukraine
Despite the large amount of research accumulated on the subject of assisted reproductive technologies in different cultural and political settings, the implementation of ART in Ukraine was left without deserved attention. However, this sphere requires investigation due to the social and theoretical problems at its heart. Firstly, Ukraine's recently emerging market of commercial infertility services is rapidly developing, becoming a target of transnational fertility travel and challenging the procreative imagery of society. Secondly, there is little reporting on the local, lived experiences of how infertile women negotiate the gendered discursive practices of assisted conception in Ukraine. In this article I will examine how the subjectivities of infertile women undergoing IVF procedures are constructed in discourses about ART in Ukraine and which power rationalities are involved in production of these subjectivities.
Clinical decision-making concerns the normal and the not normal (the Other, the different) and is marked by moral discourse. In the area of assisted reproduction technologies (ART), little is known about physicians' attitudes towards their patients, and therefore one aim of this study is to enquire into infertility clinicians' perceptions of their patients. Additionally, this study seeks to establish what kinds of patients are defined by the clinicians as Others, as less appropriate candidates for infertility treatment. In this study, clinical judgements were affected by the gendered nature of patients and by the supposed nature of potential mothers-to-be. The other patients and mothers-to-be were described in terms of their mental, physical and emotional status, and in terms of their lifestyle. The most inappropriate Other mothers-to-be were those who (or whose partner) had complicated psychosocial and health problems. A second group were described as single and supposedly lonely women, and as women who were considered too career oriented. The importance of money played a primary role in determining who is supposedly a good mother. Namely, if a woman was too rich or too stingy and career oriented, or too poor, with several psychosocial problems, her capacity for maternal love (i.e. for giving love) was questioned. The clinicians' perceptions of the roles of technology and nature in assisted reproduction technologies are also discussed.
Gendernyi Zhurnal Ya, vol 3 (34): 33-36.
In vitro fertilization (IVF) and other assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have been available in Poland since mid-1980s, and as of today there are over 40 clinics (both private and public), which offer a wide range of treatment methods. At the same time, no countryspecific legislation has been implemented, and Polish authorities have not ratified the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine from 1997. In the face of demographic crisis, and opinion polls showing majority support for the state sponsored IVF program, the ruling Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) introduced a regulation issued by the Minister of Health. On the 1st of June 2013 the government introduced a three-year plan of state-funded IVF treatments for infertile people, which is about to cover partly the costs for 15.000 heterosexual couples (married or not) in total. 1 This decision was applauded by the people affected by infertility, but did not fill the legal vacuum concerning the field of biotechnologies in general.