Funeral for an Embryo
On a freezing February morning, I pulled my rental car into the small parking lot behind a sprawling Minnesota church. I had flown halfway across the country to…
On a freezing February morning, I pulled my rental car into the small parking lot behind a sprawling Minnesota church. I had flown halfway across the country to…
The Excavating the Biosocial series has so far focused on birth cohorts as ethnographic object (Gibbon and Pentecost 2020). In this post, I explore the expansion of interest…
As the global pandemic escalates, health services are rapidly changing, creating tension between reproductive rights and safeguarding against COVID-19 spread, revealing the question: what is essentia…
Cultural anthropologist, Robbie Davis-Floyd, is considered by many as the Queen of Childbirth Studies. A Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of…
In late November, He Jiankui, a scientist in China, announced that he had created the first “CRISPR babies,” meaning that he performed germ-line genome edits on human embryos, which…
A Birthday Present Georgia, my middle daughter of three, is a combination of my DNA and identity release[1] donor #2817[2]. Unlike her sisters who both have the advantage…
This is a photograph of a publicity for a “street corner” obstetrical ultrasound in Brazil. It proclaims: “ultrasound examinations at low prices.” The advertised “low prices” can be…
What does making a new life look like from the perspective of a mobile phone? For the phone of a woman using the public health care system in…
Chekero met Pauline at a local pharmacy in Giyani, a small town in the north-east of the Limpopo Province of South Africa. The area is best known to…
(Warning: Blade Runner 2049 spoilers.) From the outset of Blade Runner 2049, Agent K (Ryan Gosling) is promised the possibility of a miracle. No longer more human than…
During the midwife-hosted antenatal class Cath attended in a private hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, where she would eventually give birth, pregnant women were encouraged to name…
Examining the migratory pathways of a global reproductive industry. We’ve joined forces with AAA’s latest public education initiative “World on the Move: 100,000 Years of Human Migration”…
Gestational surrogacy is a reproductive technology where embryos are produced ‘in-vitro’ in a laboratory and subsequently implanted into the uterus of a woman – the gestational surrogate or…
For this installment of the Top of the Heap series, I spoke with Elly Teman, a medical anthropologist specializing in the anthropology of reproduction and a senior lecturer…
Organizations such as the World Bank have repeated what has been called the “migration development mantra.” In this, remittances appear as a panacea—or “wonder drug” (Green 2015)—for economic…
In a book chapter addressing feminist research methods and women’s health and healing, Rayna Rapp (1999) wrote about the complicated ways in which everyday life is embroiled in…
By Greg Downey. (5000 words) An Italian study in 2012 found that men’s penises were growing smaller over time — two centimetres lost from grandfather to grandson in…