Selective Reproductive Technologies

Abstract

From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective fertilization of gametes, implantation of embryos, or abortion of fetuses. Although they will often overlap with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), what we term selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) are of a more specific nature: Rather than aiming to overcome infertility, they are used to prevent or allow the birth of certain kinds of children. This review highlights anthropological research into SRTs in different parts of the world, discussing how selective reproduction engages with issues of long-standing theoretical concern in anthropology, such as politics, kinship, gender, religion, globalization, and inequality. 201 Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014.43:201-216. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by University of Central Florida on 02/04/15. For personal use only.

Selective Reproduction: Social and Temporal Imaginaries for Negotiating the Value of Life in Human and Animal Neonates

“…To bring the political back into biology, they urge us to pay attention to the specific collectivities and daily lives in which the administration of life and death unfolds and to explore the ways in which "biopower distinguishes between those who live and those who are left to die" (p. 456). With this focus on "life as lived through both a body and a society" (p. 454), they are in line with a number of intriguing anthropological studies of negotiations about the worth of life at the intersections of contemporary biopolitics, medical innovation, care practices, moral imperatives, and lived experience in various ethnographic settings (Gammeltoft 2014;Kaufman 2005;Morgan 2009;Rapp 1999;Scheper-Hughes 1993;Taylor 2010;Weiner 2009). However, all of these studies stay within an anthropocentric perspective and highlight the cultural production of viability.…”

Choice, Rights, and Virtue: Prenatal Testing and Styles of Moral Reasoning in Aotearoa/New Zealand

“…This is so despite observations from the breadth of our studies that few participants think of choice as the process that they engage in for moral reasoning and despite the press of principalist arguments that suggest it is the provision of informed choice that makes difficult clinical decisions ethical. This critical reading of choice is also noted in Gammeltoft and Wahlberg (), who argue that choice is experienced by many as “obligation,” for example.…”

“…Apart from legislation and policy development, the state also operates discursively through the practices of designated experts such as counselors and clinicians. Many studies generalize these professional discourses into a dominant discourse of choice and non‐directiveness interfacing with a minor discourse of care ethics (Gammeltoft and Wahlberg ). However as Rabinow and Rose (:199) note, the concept of biopower (i.e., the combination of bio‐politics and anatomo‐politics) is “not transhistorical or metaphoric, but precisely grounded in historical, or genealogical, analysis”; nor does biopower serve “a single power bloc.” We suggest that there is much to be gained from finer grained studies of specific instances of the apparent dominance of such professional discourses to reveal their contested internal logics.…”

“…The different discourses of moral reasoning mobilized by these two groups, we will argue, are virtue ethics and social justice claims of citizenship respectively. Unlike most ethnographic studies of the politics of such testing that analyze new and old eugenic state practices or nationalist cosmologies (Gammeltoft and Wahlberg ), we focus specifically on moral reasoning as what Foucault terms the “fracturing line of force” (Senellart :3) between citizens and the state. Thus, we explore three arenas for the production of discourses of moral reasoning (NZORD, Saving Downs, and the New Zealand state via its national parliamentary debates and ethical regulatory committees’ decisions).…”

Tangled Diagnoses. Prenatal Testing, Women, and Risk. Ilana Löwy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, 319 pp.

“…Shortly after the summit, I reflected in a blog post (Wahlberg 2018) that since it seems very plausible that Lulu and Nana are the world's first gene-edited babies, my colleague Tine Gammeltoft and I would have to update our definition of selective reproductive technologies (SRTs) (Gammeltoft and Wahlberg 2014) to now include "the selective editing of gametes and embryos." He Jiankui's actions were swiftly condemned by the Summit's Organizing Committee, which nevertheless ended up concluding that "it is time to define a rigorous, responsible translational pathway toward [clinical] trials" for human embryo editing.…”