Achieving Procreation: Childlessness and IVF in Turkey by Merve Demircioğlu Göknar (review)

Reproductive healthcare practices are the focal point of a contentious debate between the state, medical practitioners, scholars, feminist groups, and in particular, women, who are both decision makers in and targets of the reproduction controversy. Studies of these practices in Turkey have become a flourishing scholarly field with valuable contributions by Delaney (1991), Gürtin (2009, 2011, 2012), and Balsoy (2013). Merve Demircioğlu Göknar’s Achieving Procreation, which is the first anthropological manuscript on fertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Turkey, builds on this rich existing literature.

Achieving Procreation examines the social meaning of childlessness and its correlation with the demand for IVF treatments in Turkey. Drawing on critical feminist theory and reproduction literature on the Middle East and Euro–America, the author examines the conceptual significance of children in women’s lives through ethnographic research in multiple settings, including two IVF clinics in Istanbul and two Anatolian villages. To address the social meaning of procreation, she analyzes the phenomena through multiple lenses such as religious rhetoric, kinship relations, and popular media representations of assisted reproductive technologies (ART).

This study is a welcome addition to studies of masculine subjectivities in Middle East. Following Inhorn’s (2009 in Middle East. Following Inhorn’s (2012) studies in the Arab world, Demircioğlu Göknar pushes scholars to transcend the academic and popular focus on IVF as solely women’s experience by demonstrating the totality of the experience of infertility through strong ethnographic evidence. Her analysis of masculinity is hybrid, as exemplified through discussions of popular media representations, such as the characters in the Turkish sitcom series called “Çocuklar Duymasın”(The Children Should Not Hear This). The author theorizes these contested, contingent, historically situated, and fluid forms of manhood with the concept of “multiple masculinities” (138), not to underline dominant masculinities but to show many simultaneously existing alternatives. She deftly maps out inherent power structures embedded in different categories of masculinities, such as the abilities of penile penetration or impregnation.

Another contribution of the book is its claim to consider IVF as an empowering technology for women. Demircioğlu Göknar emphasizes the agency of women as the initiators of the process, in contrast to previous works that are critical of this technology for disempowering women either by reifying motherhood (Arditti, Klein, and Minden 1984) or by framing IVF as a masculine technology (Stolcke 1988). Most of her interlocutors narrate how “they produce a child themselves” (159), calling attention to the social, physical, and psychological labor, in addition to their biological involvement in procreation. Deciding to undergo IVF treatment, persuading their husbands (in Turkey, IVF is only legal for heterosexual, married couples), actively partaking in the medical component of the treatment, such as doing the injections themselves, and keeping up with the stressful IVF process are some examples of women enacting agency.

Demircioğlu Göknar starts the book by questioning reasons behind the desire to have a child. In a context in which this desire is “naturalized,” she explores how the widely circulated metaphor of a “tree without a fruit” is deployed to reinforce and create stereotypes of infertile women as undesirable or incomplete. While underlining the significance of these metaphorical entailments to depict the meanings of motherhood, the book warns us against essentializing the experience of childlessness by overemphasizing symbols such as the fruitless tree, since, in practice, many childless marriages survive the dominant discourse against infertile women.

The second chapter highlights the centrality of the religious discourse in understandings of infertility by exploring how “religion as a discourse and practice” (68) both intensifies and alleviates the suffering of childless women. In her analysis, Demircioğlu Göknar evokes Asad’s (1986) understanding of Islam as a discursive tradition and Burke’s (1969) theory of rhetoric to suggest that the use of religious rhetoric as a means of self-persuasion is predicated on the main discursive pillars of Islam, Quran, and hadith. Understanding their inability to conceive in terms of a...