50 cents?

Harvard@Home has posted an extraordinary amount of information from a conference that I suspect many of you might find interesting: Reproductive Health in the 21st Century, held by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study back in October.

There's high quality video of all the talks (which are all about 20 minutes long), along with text summaries and direct links to the speakers' slides. Ooooooooh. The topics careen from radical new contraceptives to consequences of reproductive oppression to—yes, fertility treatment, too.

Let me particularly recommend Sherman Silber's lightly controlled rant on female reproductive aging, the futility of most treatments other than IVF, and the horrid economics of it all in the U.S. (the post title is what he claims the cost of producing an amp of HMG to be). Warning: he's a serious ART advocate and says nasty things about most surgical infertility treatments (just like he does in his generally quite useful book).

Also, Marcia Inhorn's discussion of IVF in the Islamic world is a fascinating look at how another of the world's great religions is reacting to, and using, new technology:

In at least one Shi'ite clinic in which I worked in Lebanon, some [donors] are young college-aged women being recruited from the United States, from the heartland, who are anonymously donating their eggs to conservative Shi'ite couples in Lebanon, including members of Hizbullah, which is officially condemned by the U.S. administration as a terrorist organization. These reproductive landscapes are very surreal; very—I have to say, just to give you an image, walking into a Shi'ite clinic in Lebanon, where most of the people look like they're living in Iran. Women are in chador, men are wearing turbans on their heads, and they're waiting anxiously, lining and pacing, and then in walk blond, voluptuous, American donors in short shorts, and tiny t-shirts, walking through the clinic, supposedly anonymously donating their eggs. And the fantasies, of some of the men, that were played out in interviews were really amazing.

(Sunni fatwas declate all forms of donation or surrogacy to be wrong; Shi'ites are less convinced.)

If you find yourself insomniac, you might consider the entire The Unsettling of the Natural session. Michael Sandel and Kathy Hudson demonstrate that most of the audience at the session, and most of the American population in general, think PGD is, uh, kind of gross. It's mostly in a context of sex selection, and I really wanted to hit several of the commenters over the head with a copy of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature—sex selection has been around for a long time, whether through abandonment after birth, differential care, or abortion post-ultrasound (which is perfectly legal in the U.S., although clearly not used with the same vigor as in parts of Asia). It's getting less morally awful with technology, not more so.

Plus it makes me mad whenever people start talking about this sort of choice leading to the "commodification" of reproduction, which might, you know, be the worst thing ever. (Hey, have you looked at the classified ads recruiting egg donors in your campus paper recently? Much knottier forms of commodification are already here, folks.) And there's at least one discussant who comes right out and says that her worry is that most people would not have any kind of principled basis for making a gender choice. Aaaaah. You don't trust other people to choose. I get it now. Look, could you just stop being the kind of cultural elitist who gives the rest of us liberal elites such a bad rep?

Comments

[Cecily]

Wow. I don't have time to view all the links, but what a great, informative, and smart post!

[Cory]

Thanks for the thorough review of the conference; I look forward to reviewing the links (when I'm not at work). Best wishes.