Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies Book

You are born, you grow, you reproduce and then you die; people might think that this are the basic stages of a life circle. If you are born you are sure that one day you will die but that every person that is born will grow or be able to reproduce is not real. People may die at an early age for multiple reasons (but that won't be discussed in here) preventing them from growing. In the area of reproduction not everyone has the same advantage as others. You might focus on work and live this part for later and then find out that your biological clock has pass (mostly in the case of women), or you can have suffer an injury that makes you infertile, or you were just born like that. They are many reasons for people to be infertile. Sometimes is unfair how easily some couples are able to have kids but how difficult is for others. Thanks to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) it has come more easily for infertile people to reproduce.


ART has made infertile people be able to have a child, but this technology has been discriminatory in a certain way. The cost of using this technology is so high that it permits access only to middle and high class of society. The problem with this is not the technology by itself but the policy that backs up that technology. In some countries the use of ART is covered by insurance, as an example we can mention Israel where every women will have full subsidy for her first two kids[i]. The basic problem between ART and access to it is based on the policy that governs that technology and in the case of the US few states mandate insurance coverage and not all insurance cover the use of ART. This means that in the case of the US the usage of ART is limited to those that have the ability to pay by their own. The usage of ART is to treat infertility a problem that affects people in all economic groups. But in the case of the US the problem is wider than the access to ART, is the access to basic health.

In the book 'Making Parents: the Ontological Choreography of Reproduction Technologies' Charis Thompson provides the insight of the ART world. Thompson shows the issues that surround ART from a philosophical, moral and theoretical perspective where she compares the technology, the professional protocols and the clinical spaces with the emotions of the parents to be (consumers of ART). Thompson makes this study based on observation of two ART clinics that she worked on, as well as her perspective from being a patient of ART, using a medical ethnography method. The main focus of her study is the cultural mechanisms that makes parents and shapes kinship in the process of producing babies.


In the first part of the book Thompson provides the theoretical research on the field of ART from the perspective of science and technology studies as well as from feminist studies (both her field of expertise). This part provides more a historical description of the work done in the field but not a full framework where her work will be based on.

The second part Thompson provides the insight of the ART. It is in this part that Thompson explains the normalization practices, how the patients become part of the technology and how the technology shapes them to become parents. Then she discusses the part of infertile men and how they come to be fathers. After that she discusses the process of construction, protection of kinship with the usage of different strategies. Thompson finalize this part by exposing how women use agency for dealing with their own problem of infertility, also showing how the perception of each women changes based on the stage of the process she is at, and the success or failure she has experience. In this last part Thompson reminds us how infertile people choose to have their reproduction intimacies reduce to medical and technical maneuvers just so that eventually they can have a kid.