Conceptions: Infertility and Procreative Technologies in India

312 Pages·2016·1.049 MB·English

by  Aditya Bharadwaj

ConCeptions
Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality
General editors:
Soraya Tremayne, Founding Director, Fertility and Reproduction
Studies Group and Research Associate, Institute of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, University of Oxford.
Marcia C. Inhorn, William K. Lanman, Jr., Professor of Anthropology and
International Affairs, Yale University.
Philip Kreager, Director, Fertility and Reproduction Studies Group and
Research Associate, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and
Institute of Human Sciences, University of Oxford.
For a full volume listing please see back matter.
CONCEPTIONS
i p
nfertility and roCreative
t i
eChnologies in ndia
Aditya Bharadwaj
berghahn
N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D
www.berghahnbooks.com
First published in 2016 by
Berghahn Books
www.BerghahnBooks.com
© 2016 Aditya Bharadwaj
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system now known or to be
invented, without written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bharadwaj, Aditya, - author.
Title: Conceptions : infertility and procreative technologies in India /
Aditya Bharadwaj.
Other titles: Fertility, reproduction, and sexuality ; v. 34.
Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2016. | Series: Fertility,
reproduction and sexuality ; volume 34 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2016021769| ISBN 9781785332302 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785332319 (ebook)
Subjects: | MESH: Reproductive Techniques, Assisted--psychology |
Infertility--psychology | Sociological Factors | India
Classifcation: LCC RG133.5 | NLM WQ 208 | DDC 618.1/78060954--
dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021769
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78533-230-2 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-78533-231-9 (ebook)
for my parents who made it all possible

C
ontents
Preface: Test-Tube Conceptions ix
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction: Conceptualising Conceptions 1
Part i
Chapter One. Fertile Conceptions: Culture and Infertility 43
Chapter Two. Gendered Conceptions: Stigma,
Blame and Infertility 68
Part ii
Chapter Three. Contested Conception:
The Medical Politics of Test-Tube Babies 89
Chapter Four. Politics of Conception:
The State and Biomedicine 108
Part iii
Chapter Five. Changing Conceptions?
‘Adoption’ of Assisted Conception 137
Chapter Six. Supplementary Conception: The Other Mother 169
Part iV
Chapter Seven. Long Road to Conception:
Emotional and Financial Costs 191
Chapter Eight. In Search of Conception:
Clinicians, Patients and Clinics 214
Afterword: Conceptions 243
Bibliography 253
Index 279
l t f
ist of ables and igures
Figures
3.1 Indian Council for Medical Research Annual Report 96
5.1 The Double Conceptual Bind and Assisted Conception 141
Tables
1.1 The Niyoga Model vs The Virgin Model 61
p
refaCe
test-tube ConCeptions
This book has long been in the making. In India, assisted concep-
tion, especially in vitro fertilisation (IVF), became normalised as
test-tube babymaking in the early 1980s. My frst encounter with
the phrase ‘test-tube baby’ dates back to 1986 when the Indian me-
dia heralded the birth of India’s so-called frst scientifcally docu-
mented test-tube baby with much fanfare. I was in school in New
Delhi and living with my family. I felt an instantaneous connection
between the big news of the day and the cover of a TIME Magazine
from 1978 gathering dust in my father’s bookcase that featured a
large test tube with a human embryo foating in translucent liquid.
My school friends and I were convinced that babies could now be
made in glass tubes, a scientifc possibility that ftted beautifully into
our science fction world of Star Wars. While our childish imagina-
tions had simplistically accepted the possibility of making babies in
tubes, in actual fact, this imagination had percolated down much
further. Fifteen years ago, one of my interview respondents, for
instance, recalled his family’s worries on learning of their son and
daughter-in law’s decision to have a test-tube baby. It took nothing
short of a visit to his hometown with his visibly pregnant wife to
allay his family’s fears that the baby was not incubating in a large
tube elsewhere.
A lot has changed in India since then. The test-tube baby break-
through in the India of my childhood occurred in a radically dif-
ferent world: the Cold War was far from over, the Berlin Wall was
intact and geopolitically the world was bipolar. In this world order,
knowledge, wealth and power fowed from the developed North/
West to the developing South/East. Science fction babies conceived
in test tubes could emerge only in global locales like the United
x Preface
Kingdom and, as the book will later show, competing claims from a
former colony would remain patently untenable until an economi-
cally and ideologically ‘liberalised’ India of the late 1990s would be-
gin to assert itself as the locus of knowledge production and wealth
generation.
The economic liberalisation and opening up of the Indian econ-
omy in 1991 to the ebbs of global market forces and fows of inter-
national capital would author another signifcant shift. India would
fnally emerge from the shadow of its colonial past and begin a pain-
fully slow drift towards the American model of economic capitalisa-
tion and cultural expansion. However, in the 1980s of my childhood
and teenage years, British cultural infuence was everywhere: from
BBC soap operas on television and English curriculum in schools to
fashion trends and Britpop animating the lives of middle-class teens.
As the test-tube saga unfolded in India, I remember vividly a popu-
lar dirty joke doing the rounds in my all-boys Catholic school. The
joke, ‘spare the rod spoil the child’, was inspired by the lowbrow,
but popular, British show Benny Hill and the Rugby Jokes compen-
diums. The senior boys in my school were particularly tickled by the
clinical and non-sexual modality of test-tube conception. Within a
decade, however, Britain would be dislodged as the core cultural
reference point, both high and low, amongst the English-speaking
Indian middle classes, and a more mainstream American sensibil-
ity would emerge. In this changing world, still an ongoing process,
‘mates’ would become ‘dudes’, British slapstick would give way to
American sitcom and the political establishment would undergo a
post-Cold War thaw, warming up to the United States. The privi-
leged middle-class childhood I recall here, like the test-tube con-
ceptions, existed in a parallel universe from which millions of poor
Indians were shut out. Larger shifts in India’s global standing and
relations with Britain and the United States have little impact on
their everyday lives, except perhaps to make it that much harder
to survive in booming neo-India. To this day they could never even
dream of accessing these conception technologies, except when it is
their body parts that are bought and contracted to bring forth new
life for the local and global elites.
Throughout the 1990s my encounters with the world of the in-
fertile and test-tube babies were confned to mass media accounts.
Media attention, if anything, had become more persistent, and by
1995 I had begun contemplating researching assisted conception in
contemporary India. In 1996 I was in the ‘feld’ armed with a close
reading of feminist and anthropological research with a distinctive