Since the 1970s, alarming discourses about declining fertility and the
difficulties of balancing work and family have flourished in Western
countries. Captured by the notion of the 'biological clock', they put
women's reproductive age and the fertility decline to the centre of
public and medical attention. Reproductive biomedicine constitutes a
specific domain invested with hopes for technological and medical
answers and a new market for fertility extension technologies, such as
egg donation and social egg freezing. Addressing long-standing
questions about the articulation of the biological and the social in
the making of bodies and identities, this book questions the nature of
reproductive ageing, a taken for granted 'fact of life' at the core of
reproductive biomedicine. What is the biology of the 'biological
clock' made of and how can we account for its embodied reality from a
feminist perspective? Opening the black box of the biological, the
book makes a way between essentialism and constructivism with the aim
of accounting for its materiality, while also illuminating its
political implications. By following the ontological choreographies of
age-related infertility in the science and medicine of reproduction,
this study explores how age materializes and documents what happens
when reproduction meets ageing. Deeply transdisciplinary, it questions
what is fixed about the biology of the fertility decline in a way
which adds complexity to debates about the biomedicalization of
reproductive ageing.
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The Science and Medicine of the Fertility Decline
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781839097485
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
Emerald Publishing Ltd.
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter