Anindita Majumdar
In India today, assisted reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), have facilitated third-party reproduction to the benefit of many childless couples. In the theorization of practices such as donor sperm, donor eggs facilitate birth or surrogacy (that involves the participation of a gestate in carrying an artificially conceived embryo to full term for relinquishment) – the meaning of kinship itself is under scrutiny. Despite classical and contemporary analysis of India and South Asia, a kinship that places practices and meanings within the ambit of structuralism and relatedness, reproductive technologies have destabilized the multiple meanings that kinship in South Asia embodied. In the north Indian state of Haryana, where skewed sex ratios, violence against women, and honour killings create the imaginings around a community, assisted reproductive technologies such as IVF influence the desire for progeny. Here, emerging practices in IVF and assisted reproduction have created new forms of social anxieties and exacerbated existing ones. In the desire for biological progeny, many infertile married couples in their late fifties and early sixties have been undergoing IVF to birth children. In a largely agrarian setting, being childless is problematic and akin to a form of social death, especially for the woman – but with the support of IVF, many of such men and women have been able to overturn the stigma of infertility after decades of suffering from it. Yet the practice is not without its own set of stigmatizing markers. Amongst the community of gynaecologists and obstetricians in India, the practice of facilitating assisted birth amongst women past menopause has been met with criticism and disdain.