Infertility around the Globe: New Thinking on Childlessness, Gender, and Reproductive Technologies

Contributors

335 CONTRIBUTORS Gay Becker is Professor in Residence, Social and Behavioral Sciences and Medical Anthropology, at the University of California, San Francisco. She has been studying infertility and reproductive technologies for more than twenty years, a project that grew out of her own experience with infertility. Her work includes a general study of people’s experiences with infertility, which has resulted in the publication of three University of California Press books: Healing the Infertile Family: Strengthening Your Relationship in the Search for Parenthood, Disrupted Lives: How People Create Meaning in a Chaotic World, and The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies . She is also the author, with Robert Nachtigall, of several articles on donor insemination. For four years, she served as editor of the Society for Medical Anthropology’s journal, Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Aditya Bharadwaj is Research Fellow at Cardiff University, Wales, having recently completed his doctorate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bristol. His dissertation, “Conceptions,” examines infertility and the increasing use of new reproductive technologies in India. In the past, he has studied the medical management of childbirth, maternal nutrition , and immunization in India. His research on infertility is an outgrowth of his overall research interests in reproductive health care issues, qualitative research methods, and the anthropological study of India. His current research is in the area of new genetics and population screening for susceptibility to genetic diseases in the United Kingdom. Sheryl de Lacey is Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Flinders University in South Australia and an affiliate with Reproductive Medicine Services offered by the University of Adelaide. She has contrib- 336 CONTRIBUTORS uted to the development of practice and policy in the field of infertility and assisted reproduction through membership in several national ethics committees and policy-making councils over the past fifteen years. Her work includes reviews of how information for children should be regulated, surrogacy, counseling and issues of access in assisted reproduction, and the long-term health effects of assisted reproduction. Her research includes study of the experience of egg donors and a discourse analysis of infertility and in vitro fertilization failure. Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton College. She has conducted research on women’s reproductive health care in Cameroon since the early 1980s. Her work focuses on the social conditions that give rise to fear of infertility. Extensive field research in a rural Bamiléké chiefdom as well as research in European archives has resulted in numerous publications, including Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields (University of Michigan Press, 1999). Current research on urban Bamiléké women’s ethnic associations, social networks, and reproductive strategies is supported by an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Anthropological Demography and by the National Science Foundation. Trudie Gerrits is a medical anthropologist and health educator, working as a researcher and lecturer in the Medical Anthropology Unit of the University of Amsterdam. She is project assistant for the Gender, Reproductive Health and Population Policies Project, an international action research project that aims at generating innovative knowledge about women’s and men’s needs regarding reproductive health services. From 1985 to 1990 she worked at the Ministry of Health in Mozambique, and in 1993 she conducted a study on social and cultural aspects of infertility in Mozambique , about which she has published a number of articles. She was an initiator and organizer (with Frank van Balen) of an international conference , Interpreting Infertility: Social Science Research on Childlessness in a Global Perspective, held in Amsterdam in November 1999. She has sixyear -old IVF twins, Carmen and Jaap. Arthur L. Greil is Professor of Sociology and Health Policy at Alfred University , Alfred, New York, where he has taught since 1977. His main research interests are in the areas of reproductive health, adult socialization and identity change, and the sociology of religion. His book, Not Yet Pregnant: Infertile Couples in Contemporary America (Rutgers University Press, 1991), deals with themes of gender and the experience of infertility and is based on the qualitative analysis of interviews with both partners of infertile American couples. He has also published a number of other articles on infertility, including a major review of the literature on infertility and psychological CONTRIBUTORS 337 distress. He became interested in infertility as a result of his own experiences , and...