While interest in the drivers, consequences, nature and manifestations of voluntary and involuntary childlessness increases, knowledge progress is hampered by poor linkages across disjointed research fields. The book brings together theoretical insights and empirical investigations into the phenomenon, united within a feminist conceptual framework.

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access, thanks to Knowledge Unlatched funding, and freely available to read online. This book explores the experiences of some of the pioneering users of social egg freezing technology in the UK and the USA. Their motivations and experiences are contextualised alongside academic discussion.

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...

This book explores the empirical manifestations of the paradoxical features of reproductive technologies and provides in-depth understandings of solo motherhood through assisted reproduction and by recognising the complex experiences and the lived realities of forming donor-conceived families. The author offers insights into how single women 'do' family, identity and kinship and how the choice to create life as a solo mother is continuously rationalised. She uncovers how established, societal cultural narratives are adopted, negotiated and transformed in the processes of decision-making and...

This timely and fascinating feminist ethnography is the first of its kind to focus on commercial surrogacy workers in Russia and from other countries of the former Soviet Union. Examining surrogacy workers' reproductive labour, and experiences of stratification and migration, the study presents innovative insights into current research on global surrogacy practices and travels for assisted reproduction. It links to wider fields of studies, such as ethnicity, feminism, women's and gender studies in the post-Soviet sphere. Weis expertly brings together rigorous ethnographic research, feminist...

Reproductive Governance and Bodily Materiality explores the growing centrality and power of the medical professional and lay practices within the field of human reproduction as they entangle with political economic processes, providing examples from multiple countries. Throughout the collection the authors address the issues of abortion, sterilization, 'natural' childbirth, breastfeeding, surrogacy, pregnancy loss, IVF, disability and parenting, whilst focusing both on the mechanisms through which reproductive behaviours are shaped and controlled, and on the socially and culturally...

Drawing from extensive ethnographic research on abortion debates in public spaces, this book explores the beliefs, motivations and practices of UK anti-abortion activists. Whilst they represent a tiny minority, there is recent evidence of an increase in activism outside UK abortion clinics; faith-based groups regularly organise 'vigils' seeking to deter service users from entering clinics. In response to this, pro-choice groups launched a campaign for buffer-zones around clinics. Although there is overwhelming public support for abortion, it remains an area of public contestation that touches...

>Human reproduction is mediated through many technologies, both high- and low-tech. These technologies of reproduction are not experienced in isolation by most of the people who use them. However clinical, public health and social scientific research often reflects a parcelling out of reproduction into specialist areas of biomedical intervention. Studies tend to be bound to specific physiological events, technologies (particularly those that are more obviously technical or ‘modern’) and people – namely cis, heterosexual, white, middle-class women. Yet, with the ever-expanding horizon of...