The New Reproductive Order: Technology, Fertility, and Social Change around the Globe

The transformative impact of new reproductive technologies over the past half century

Both fertility and infertility are commonly depicted as individual, biological, and choice dependent conditions that can be mediated by technology. In contrast, The New Reproductive Order documents the complex material, historical, and political forces that both enable and limit human reproductivity, while also arguing that both fertility and infertility have become condensed symbols of wider changes to family forms, national political agendas, global economies, and local environments.

Combining anthropological, sociological, and intersectional feminist research from across the globe, this landmark volume reveals how changing perceptions of fertility and infertility are altering how people imagine, pursue, and experience reproductivity both individually and collectively. Using a comparative global methodology based on detailed case studies, The New Reproductive Order persuasively argues that changing perceptions of fertility and infertility are giving rise to a distinctive reproductive politics based on new models of reproductive cause and effect. This groundbreaking and sophisticated volume opens new horizons of scholarship on the relationship between fertility, infertility, reproductive technologies, and social change, as well as new thinking on policy, practice, and activism in the twenty-first century’s new reproductive order.

Marcia C. Inhorn is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University. She is the author or coeditor of twenty-one volumes, including Cosmopolitan Conceptions: IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai and Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs.