{"title":"Enacting embryos: Practices, ontologies, and politics of the IVF lab post-Dobbs.","authors":"Manon Lefevre","doi":"10.1111/maq.12916","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn the federal right to abortion, much public and political debate has surrounded gestating and in vitro embryos' \"personhood.\" In this paper, I draw on 15 months of participant observation in biomedical spaces of infertility to reveal how embryos can be enacted as not only unborn children but as many different kinds of entities. I examine how embryos become \"multiple\" as in vitro fertilization (IVF) professionals inseminate, monitor, and transfer them into patients' bodies: enacting them as makeable, contingent, recordable, animatable, predictable, introducible, praisable, and appraisable entities. Providing a new perspective into the varied ontologies of in vitro embryos, this paper has far-reaching implications for the anthropological study and politics of reproductive medicine and politics today.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e12916"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12916","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ANTHROPOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn the federal right to abortion, much public and political debate has surrounded gestating and in vitro embryos' "personhood." In this paper, I draw on 15 months of participant observation in biomedical spaces of infertility to reveal how embryos can be enacted as not only unborn children but as many different kinds of entities. I examine how embryos become "multiple" as in vitro fertilization (IVF) professionals inseminate, monitor, and transfer them into patients' bodies: enacting them as makeable, contingent, recordable, animatable, predictable, introducible, praisable, and appraisable entities. Providing a new perspective into the varied ontologies of in vitro embryos, this paper has far-reaching implications for the anthropological study and politics of reproductive medicine and politics today.
期刊介绍：
Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health publishes research and theory in the field of medical anthropology. This broad field views all inquiries into health and disease in human individuals and populations from the holistic and cross-cultural perspective distinctive of anthropology as a discipline -- that is, with an awareness of species" biological, cultural, linguistic, and historical uniformity and variation. It encompasses studies of ethnomedicine, epidemiology, maternal and child health, population, nutrition, human development in relation to health and disease, health-care providers and services, public health, health policy, and the language and speech of health and health care.
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