Virgin births and sterile debates: anthropology and the new reproductive technologies
Shore, C.; Abrahams, R.G.; Collier, J.F.; Delaney, C.; Fox, R.; Frankenberg, R.; Lambert, H.S.; Melhuus, M.; Schneider, D.M.; Stolcke, V.; Wolfram, S.
Current Anthropology 33(3): 295-314
1992
ISSN/ISBN: 0011-3204 PMID: 11659550 DOI: 10.2307/2743799Document Number: 326616
This article explores some of the social, political, and anthropological issues raised by the new reproductive technologies, focusing on the controversies surrounding Britain's 1984 Warnock report and the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill of 1990. The way in which these issues were debated and resolved in the press and in Parliament sheds some light on what are evidently conflicting and contested constructs of kinship, family, and personhood in contemporary Britain. These issues must also be interpreted from other perspectives, however, particularly examining the political and gender dimensions of discourses about reproduction. Comparison of current debates over fertility control with older anthropological controversies concerning native beliefs about conception suggests that in each case such beliefs have various levels of social significance: the task of anthropological inquiry is to explore their deeper structural and ideological implications. The assumption that the new reproductive technologies are controversial simply because they threaten established ideals of the family and motherhood is found wanting: instead, what is at issue is the vested interest that all societies have in the symbolic control of fertility and reproduction.