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‘Oh but Ireland has changed . . .’ I heard this refrain about change from virtually everyone I spoke with in the course of eighteen months of fieldwork . People were referring generally to the way the rapid economic development known as the ‘Celtic Tiger’ had facilitated new employment opportunities and an improved lifestyle for many Irish families. Talk of change also refers to what people perceive as the end of an era in which the Catholic Church held a monopoly on dictating the normative values of sex, marriage, procreation and family. Change thus animated many discussions on issues like sex and sexuality, reproductive decisionmaking and reproductive health. While the dominant basis for reproductive morality, as both a sense of right and wrong and driver of social norms, has long been established and perpetuated by the church in Ireland, other institutions have also made use of reproduction as a means of establishing the terms for gender difference and naturalised inequality. Following from this point, church, political and medical institutions also employ the concept of nature, from a number of perspectives, as a means of legitimising claims to moral authority. My research has focused on both institutional discourses and individual narratives about an inability to conceive in Ireland. Through the lens of infertility the research portrays the very real dilemmas that emerge from inconsistencies and contradictions in attempts to define, categorically , the place of nature in reproductive decision-making and in the local moral world in which these decisions are made. We also see how the changing concept of nature creates space for talk of social change. These questions also relate to the way ‘nature’ becomes a basis for ‘standards of the good, the beautiful, the just, and the valuable’ – in other words how nature becomes the basis for moral authority.1 But equally important is the challenge to the primacy of biology in the definition of one’s ‘own’ child. For couples who consider adoption as a strategy for producing a family, the subject for another book perhaps, and beyond the scope of this work, the need to reconfigure the meaning of a child of ‘one’s own’ requires that they be enabled to move beyond 181 8. Conclusion: Confirmation and Contestation in a Changing Ireland the discourse of biologically determined identity in constituting family. In a world where genetics and biological relationships increasingly determine our notions of potential for health and identity, the impact of biology on our social selves is often over-emphasised and the social significance of relatedness is lost. The more I spoke to people about infertility the more I began to understand it as an experience that ran against the grain of many meanings associated with reproduction. Through their stories about experiences with infertility people often contested the foundational meanings and naturalised differences that informed reproductive politics in Ireland’s past. At the same time, it is apparent that there is no consensus on the meaning of the concept of change in Ireland’s present. Infertility is, however, an experience through which change can be marked, precisely because it is steeped in the meanings associated with past idealisms and the desire for some sense of continuity in the present. I have endeavoured to provide, through an emphasis on ethnographic empathy, an understanding of what people face when they are unable to conceive a child. I focus on the way an absence of conception exposes embodied and gendered identities as contingent rather than ‘natural’ or immutable; how infertility alters the meaning of personal, family, social and institutional relationships; how it forces people to confront , often for the first time, the very roots of their ethical decision-making with respect to reproduction; the complicated politics of adoption and the imaginary gap it creates between the biology of reproduction and the social commitment of parenthood; and how people’s experiences can sometimes simultaneously contest, contradict and reaffirm the dominant meanings of procreation from biological, medical, social and religious viewpoints. I have also tried to locate this array of issues in this particular moment in Irish history – a moment that everyone describes as only just beyond a point marked by something called change. The most important discovery for me, as a researcher, and the most complex analytical issue, has been the consistent presence of conflicted feelings, contested ideals, and ambivalence that is evident in narratives as people describe the difficult decisions they make in relation to reproduction and infertility. In her examination of the debate surrounding the divorce referendum in November 1995, and...

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