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The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History pp 461–489Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Janus Face of Infertility in the Global North and South: Reviewing Feminist Contributions to the Debate

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Abstract

This chapter offers an account of the historical emergence of the ‘Janus face’ of infertility in the global North and South, focusing on the period from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s as a particularly active time of development in infertility policy, practice, and debate. It details feminist contributions to discussions on gender development in the Third World that focus on fertility rates, reproductive health services, and population control, and explores feminist contributions to understanding the role of medical technologies in overcoming infertility, and the consequent revolution in understandings of kinship and conception, particularly in the First World. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s thesis that the movement for women’s liberation has become entangled with neoliberal efforts that encourage ‘disorganized’ globalizing effects, this chapter explores the contribution of gender development and gender justice approaches to differential understandings about the provision of, and access to, infertility treatments in local and global contexts.

We would like to acknowledge Naomi Simon-Kumar for her research references for this article.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This chapter uses terms such as global South/global North, First/Third World, developed/developing interchangeably, but with caution. These terms are used in part to reflect the thinking of the time when the scholarship under discussion was produced. In general, global North/First World/developed refer to countries in North America and Europe, while the global South/Third World/developing world consists of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These divisions are derived from mid-twentieth-century categorizations based on levels of wealth and poverty. Arguably, in the twenty-first century, the distribution of wealth is not restricted to these boundaries. Asia, particularly, has seen significant wealth increases without a commensurate decline in poverty.

  2. 2.

    In the global North, this was reflected in the rise of the second wave of feminism, while in the global South, there was a concomitant emergence of women-in-development and Third World-led transnational feminism.

  3. 3.

    Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London, 2013).

  4. 4.

    Charis M. Thompson, ‘Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorize Infertility’, in Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen (eds), Infertility Around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender and Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2002), p. 53.

  5. 5.

    Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York, 2009).

  6. 6.

    Fraser, Scales of Justice, p. 221.

  7. 7.

    Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism.

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    World Health Organization (WHO), Technical Report Series No. 582. The Epidemiology of Infertility: Report of a WHO Scientific Group (Geneva, 1975), p. 6: http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/37422/1/WHO_TRS_582_eng.pdf. Accessed 6 December 2016.

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    Zegers-Hochschild et al‚ ‘International Committee for Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technology (ICMART) and the World Health Organization (WHO) Revised Glossary of ART Terminology’, p. 1522.

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    WHO, Technical Report Series No. 582, p. 4

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    Rutstein and Shah, Infecundity, Infertility, and Childlessness in Developing Countries.

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    Bertarelli Foundation Scientific Board, ‘Public Perception on Infertility and its Treatment’, p. 334.

  30. 30.

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    Frank van Balen and Marcia C. Inhorn, ‘Introduction: Interpreting Infertility: A View from the Social Sciences’, in van Balen and Inhorn (eds), Infertility Around the Globe, p. 12.

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    Lupton, Medicine as Culture.

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    See Sunita Tandulwadkar, Pooja Lodha and Vineeta Kharb, ‘Congenital Malformations and Assisted Reproductive Technique: Where is Assisted Reproductive Technique Taking Us?’, Journal of Human Reproductive Sciences, 5:3 (2012), for a discussion of this issue.

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    See Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women (Oxford, 1986), pp. 281–3; van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Introduction: Interpreting Infertility’, pp. 13–17; Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli, ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Culture Change’, pp. 183–6; Sarah Franklin, Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kinship (Durham, NC, 2013), p. 155.

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    For example, Jyotsna A. Gupta and Annemiek Richters, ‘Embodied Subjects and Fragmented Objects: Women’s Bodies, Assisted Reproduction Technologies and the Right to Self-Determination’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 5:4 (2008); Manjeer Mukherjee and Sarojini B. Nadimipally, ‘Assisted Reproductive Technologies in India’, Development, 49:4 (2006).

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    E. Oluwole Akande, ‘Affordable Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Developing Countries: Pros and Cons’, Human Reproduction, 1 (July 2008); Willem Ombelet, ‘Global Access to Infertility Care In Developing Countries: A Case Of Human Rights, Equity And Social Justice’, Facts, Views & Vision in ObGyn, 3:4 (2011); Effy Vayena, ‘Assisted Reproduction in Developing Countries: The Debate at a Turning Point’, in Frida Simonstein (ed.), Reprogen-Ethics and the Future of Gender (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London and New York, 2009).

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    Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, p. 3.

  121. 121.

    Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism, p. 113.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cardiff University School of Social Sciences, Cardiff, Wales, UK

    Sara MacBride-Stewart

  2. The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Rachel Simon-Kumar

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  1. Sara MacBride-Stewart
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  2. Rachel Simon-Kumar
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Correspondence to Sara MacBride-Stewart .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Gayle Davis

  2. Department of History, University of Essex, Colchester, Essex, UK

    Tracey Loughran

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MacBride-Stewart, S., Simon-Kumar, R. (2017). The Janus Face of Infertility in the Global North and South: Reviewing Feminist Contributions to the Debate. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_24

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