Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Case Study of Traveling Abroad to Access Reproductive Technologies

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This project investigates the quest of Turkish citizens to select offspring gender prior to in vitro fertilization using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Citizens travel to Northern Cyprus for these procedures, which are illegal in Turkey. The proposed research will use a multi-sited ethnography to explore whether families are utilizing gender selection technology to achieve traditional son preference standards, or more modern, balanced families. As such, the research explores the extent to which moral pluralism is present, meaning the extent to which there are multiple values essentially involved that are equally fundamental, yet conflict with one another. These ethical issues will be situated within a larger socio-political context, Muslim-majority secular countries of the Mediterranean. The results of this research will be disseminated to a broad a public using an open source digital repository platform, as well as to professional journals and conferences in both English and Turkish. Technical Summary This study of Turkish cross-border pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for non-therapeutic gender selection calls for the social analysis of reproductive technology, trans/nationalism, family making, bio-ethics, and gender. It focuses on two central social-scientific questions. One concerns how gender selection is understood, utilized and made morally appropriate by Turkish citizens as a mode of reproduction. The other concerns what tensions or transformations in contemporary Turkish ideologies of gender and family are revealed by these moral negotiations. The proposed research will contribute to feminist studies of reproductive technologies informed by Science and Technology Studies, the emerging scholarship on reproductive tourism in anthropology and the ethnography of gender, family and nationalism in Turkey, considering trans-nationalism in relation to global flows of technology and people as well as constraints posed by the state.