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  • Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) in a Globalising India:Ethics, Medicalisation and Agency
  • Maya Unnithan (bio)
Maya Unnithan

Maya Unnithan is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex in the UK. Dr Unnithan's current research interests are in the anthropology of reproduction, health, gender and development. Her publications include several books including the edited volume, Reproductive Agency, Medicine and the State (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2004) and several articles on the issues of agency, emotion, knowledge, rights and ethics in relation to childbearing processes, infertility, reproductive health and migration. She is currently leading an ESRC, UK-funded research project on NGO engagement with human rights discourse in the fields of sexual, maternal and reproductive health in India.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Jacob Leveridge and Liz Shaw of the Wellcome Trust, Jacqueline Chin, Farhat Moazam and other participants at the Wellcome School on Bioethics, Mumbai for their encouragement in developing this paper. I would like to acknowledge the helpful inputs of the editors and anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Amar Jesani for initiating an Indian forum for ethical debate in the form of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics and to Mohan Rao at JNU and Sarojini at Sama for sharing information about work on the subject in India.

Notes

1. There are two distinct positions discernable in the anthropological engagement with bioethics: firstly, the relatively more researched area which focuses on the practice of bioethics in different cultural/contextual settings, and secondly, the work that critically reflects on the biomedical framing of ethical issues. Kleinman's work falls within the second, more critical strand.

2. These include non-resident Indians and some wealthy couples from other parts of India. But these seekers of surrogacy services are in a minority according to Pande's observations (2008).

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