It’s All Connected- In the Fertility Clinic

The article, “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine” by Adele Clarke, et. al. describes the elements of biomedicalization occurring in contemporary United Statesian medicine. A key focus of the differences between medicalization and biomedicalization is on a shift from “control over” bodies and practices to “transformations of” them. The authors of this article coin the term “ Biomedical TechnoService Complex, Inc.” as a way to situate biomedicalization both politico-economically and socioculturally, with a focus on the proliferation of technoscientific innovations into the medical realm (162).

An obvious site of the entrance of technology and the furthering of the medical gaze into pregnancy and childbirth is in the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) clinic. Charis Thompson’s book, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, looks to disprove the nature-versus-culture duality and to show how the social constitutes our understanding of the natural by empirically doing work inside a fertility clinic. If the “Biomedical TechnoService Complex, Inc.” shows how biomedicalization has entered politics, economics, society, and culture, the fertility clinic is a place where one can see intersections and a co-constitutive nature of all of these at work.

In terms of the (bio)medicalization of pregnancy and birthing, Thompson’s work helps us to realize the materiality of constructions. As is mentioned in the previous posting, obstetricians socially constructed a new framework for understanding pregnancy and childbirth. This does not mean that this new construction did not lead to a very real reality. Thompson says, “what I have found is that the metaphor of construction leads people not to discount reality but to attribute reality and causal power to many ontologically different kinds of things and to many different kinds of agents” (33). This means that our understandings of women’s bodies and the biological processes of pregnancy and birthing are made from an interplay of constructed beliefs about nature and culture yet are nevertheless grounded in reality.

works cited:
Clarke, Adele et al. "Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformation of Health, Illness and U.S. Biomedicine." American Sociological Review. 68:2, 2003. 161-194.

Thompson, Charis. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.