Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions.
Infertility is the inability of a person, animal or plant to reproduce by natural means. It is usually not the natural state of a healthy adult, except notably among certain eusocial species. It is the normal state of a human child or other young offspring, because they have not undergone puberty, which is the body's start of reproductive capacity.
Surrogacy is an arrangement, often supported by a legal agreement, whereby a woman agrees to delivery/labour for another person or people, who will become the child's parent(s) after birth. People may seek a surrogacy arrangement when pregnancy is medically impossible, when pregnancy risks are dangerous for the intended mother, or when a single man or a male couple wish to have a child.
Fertility tourism is the practice of traveling to another country or jurisdiction for fertility treatment, and may be regarded as a form of medical tourism. One can usually be considered as having fertility issues when they are unable to have a clinical pregnancy after 12 months of attempts with intercourse. Infertility, or the inability to get pregnant, affects about 8-12% of couples looking to conceive or 186 million people globally. In some places, rates of infertility surpass the global average and can go up to 30% depending on the country. Areas with lack of resources, such as assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), tend to correlate with the highest rates of infertility.
Marcia Claire Inhorn is a medical anthropologist and William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University where she serves as Chair of the Council on Middle East Studies. A specialist on Middle Eastern gender and health issues, Inhorn conducts research on the social impact of infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Arab America.
Surrogacy in India and Indian surrogates became increasingly popular amongst intended parents in industrialised nations because of the relatively low costs and easy access offered by Indian surrogacy agencies. Clinics charged patients between $10,000 and $28,000 for the complete package, including fertilization, the surrogate's fee, and delivery of the baby at a hospital. Including the costs of flight tickets, medical procedures and hotels, this represented roughly a third of the price of the procedure in the UK and a fifth of that in the US. Surrogate mothers received medical, nutritional and overall health care through surrogacy agreements.
The legal aspects of surrogacy in any particular jurisdiction tend to hinge on a few central questions:
The Akanksha Infertility Clinic is a women's health centre located in Anand, Gujarat, India, and headed by Dr Nayna Patel. The clinic was founded in 1999, and was originally focused on In Vitro Fertilization. India declared commercial surrogacy legal in 2002; however the clinic did not begin to do surrogacy until 2004. Patel, who appeared on Oprah Winfrey's talk show in 2007, has produced more than 1000 surrogate babies as of October 2015.
Commodification of the womb is the process by which services performed by the female womb are offered for sale and purchased on the market. Basically it is commercial surrogacy viewed from a Marxian standpoint. The market transaction reduces the womb to merely a service provider in the marketplace. In Marxian terms, the womb in its commodified state has both exchange value and use value. Market transactions involving the services of women's wombs became increasingly common in the early twenty-first century. Such transactions are generally relied upon by those unable to conceive and those who are willing to pay someone else to bear pregnancy. Commodification of the womb raises several ethical and legal questions, which have expanded from questions regarding the rights of surrogates and biological parents, and the legitimacy of a child resulting from the transaction, to questions regarding transnational surrogacy within a global market.
LGBT parents in Canada have undergone significant progress in terms of both legal and social acceptance. Same-sex couples who wish for parenthood now enjoy equally the possibilities, responsibilities and rights of opposite-sex couples. Following the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage in 2005, the number of LGBT families in Canada has increased substantially, paving the way for same-sex couples' aspirations of having their own children. Legal methods of assisted reproduction range from insemination via IVF through to surrogacy arrangements.
Surrogacy is legal in New Zealand if it is performed altruistically, where the surrogate donates her services selflessly, without any compensation beyond the coverage of expenses. Commercial surrogacy, where the surrogate is paid in addition to the coverage of expenses, is not legal. There is a lack of specific legislation and regulations dealing with surrogacy, though the recent increase in surrogacy cases has led to a number of amendments. New Zealand is party to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and ratified it in April 1993. The primary principle of this Convention is that the best interests of the child are paramount, which must then encompass all surrogacy agreements and regulations. The lack of clear surrogacy legislation in New Zealand has led to many couples engaging in reproductive tourism in order to ensure the surrogacy is successful. This has the potential to significantly impact the human rights of all of the parties involved.
Rayna Rapp is a professor and associate chair of anthropology at New York University, specializing in gender and health; the politics of reproduction; science, technology, and genetics; and disability in the United States and Europe. She has contributed over 80 published works to the field of anthropology, independently, as a co-author, editor, and foreword-writing, including Robbie Davis-Floyd and Carolyn Sargent's Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge. Her 1999 book, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America, received multiple awards upon release and has been praised for providing "invaluable insights into the first generation of women who had to decide whether or not to terminate their pregnancies on the basis of amniocentesis result". She co-authored many articles with Faye Ginsburg, including Enabling Disability: Rewriting Kinship, Reimagining Citizenship, a topic the pair has continued to research.
Elise L. Andaya is a cultural anthropologist who is currently employed as an Associate Professor of Anthropology by the University of Albany which is the state university of New York. Andaya studies Medical anthropology and gender anthropology and focuses on the effects of gender and citizenship on reproduction and access to healthcare in Cuba and the United States. She attended New York University in New York City, New York. She previously was on the Research Development Committee for the American Anthropological Association, and was a member at large for them from 2014–2017.
Linda Louise Layne is an American anthropologist. She is a visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc). Her first book was on tribal and national identities in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.
Stratified reproduction is a widely used social scientific concept, created by Shellee Colen, that describes imbalances in the ability of people of different races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes, and genders to reproduce and nurture their children. Researchers use the concept to describe the "power relations by which some categories of people are empowered to nurture and reproduce, while others are disempowered," as Rayna Rapp and Faye D. Ginsburg defined the term in 1995.
Laura Briggs is a feminist critic and historian of reproductive politics and US empire. She works on transnational and transracial adoption and the relationship between race, sex, gender, and US imperialism. Her 2012 book Somebody's Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption won the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians for best book on the history of US race relations and has been featured on numerous college syllabi in the US and Canada. Briggs serves as professor and chair of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Surrogacy is legal in Canada provided that it is altruistic (unpaid). The Assisted Human Reproduction Act of 2004 criminalizes commercial surrogacy. The validity of surrogacy contracts and the process for establishing parenthood of the child is governed by provincial law. Quebec fails to recognize any surrogacy contracts, whereas British Columbia has the most permissive laws governing surrogacy. Provinces also vary in the degree to which they compensate surrogacy expenses, such as IVF procedures.
Susan GolombokFBA is Professor of Family Research and Director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and Professorial Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge. Her research on new family forms has contributed to theoretical understanding of family influences on child development and has addressed social and ethical issues that are of relevance to family life.
Amrita Pande is an Indian sociologist and feminist ethnographer based in South Africa, tenured as a professor at the University of Cape Town. She was the first to publish a detailed ethnographical study on the surrogacy industry in India with her book Wombs in Labor (2014). Pande has also been appointed as the lead for the National Research Foundation project into the surrogacy industry of South Africa.
LGBT reproduction refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people having biological children by means of assisted reproductive technology. It is distinct from LGBT parenting, which is a broader cultural phenomenon including LGBT adoption. In recent decades, developmental biologists have been researching and developing techniques to facilitate same-sex reproduction.
