| Titre | Ploughing the Soil, Planting the Seeds:How Hysteroscopy Creates an Exclusive Environment for Reproduction in In Vitro Fertilisation | |
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| Auteur | Mei Ding, Jiaqi Liu, Rubing Yang, Jianfeng Zhu | |
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Revue | China perspectives |
| Numéro | no 141, 2025 Medicine, Care, and Gender in Contemporary China | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | Special feature |
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| Page | 21-31 | |
| Résumé anglais |
Our research on in vitro fertilisation (IVF) centres in China shows that hysteroscopy diagnosis and surgery have been routinised as a key requirement for many women before their embryo implantation. This is especially the case if women have a history of miscarriage, abortion, and repeated failures of IVF cycles. The adoption of hysteroscopy in IVF treatment has led to the uterus increasingly being considered an exclusive environment for reproduction. This is further constructed by China's current natalist population policy and its new regional healthcare system. This article investigates how a woman's uterus becomes an exclusive environment for reproduction through the intervention of hysteroscopy in IVF; how hysteroscopy enables physicians to form a new identity by developing the perspective of embryos; and how the uterine environment is coproduced with the healthcare industry. This research therefore speaks to wider scholarship in feminist anthropology and the anthropology of visual reproductive technologies. The direct visualisation of the uterus both enables and confirms a modern medical culture that believes that the mother and the foetus tend to be in conflict, and that women must therefore do everything they can to assist the embryo to stay alive and develop. Hysteroscopy enables the construction and scientific confirmation of a view of the uterus as soil and of the embryos as seeds, and realises this metaphor in actual medical practice. Source : Éditeur (via OpenEdition Journals) |
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| Article en ligne | https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/18114 |
