When Reproduction Meets Ageing: The Science and Medicine of the Fertility Decline

What is really biological about the 'biological cloc'k and how can we account for its embodied reality from a feminist perspective? Addressing long-standing questions about the articulation of the biological and the social in the making of bodies and identities, this book questions the nature of reproductive ageing, a taken for granted 'fact of life' at the core of reproductive biomedicine.
Opening the black box of the biological, it makes a way between essentialism and constructivism with the aim of accounting for its materiality, while also illuminating its political implications. Since the 1970s, alarming discourses about declining fertility and the difficulties of balancing work and family have flourished in Western countries, putting women's reproductive age and the fertility decline to the centre of public and medical attention. Reproductive biomedicine constitutes a specific domain invested with hopes for technological and medical answers and a new market for fertility extension technologies, such as social egg freezing, is developing. By following the biological-social entanglements (or the naturecultures) of age-related infertility in the science and medicine of reproduction, this study explores how age materializes and documents what happens when reproduction meets ageing. Deeply transdisciplinary, it questions what is fixed about the biology of the fertility decline in a way which adds complexity to debates about the biomedicalization of reproductive ageing.
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