Contenu du sommaire : De la contraception à l'enfantement. L'offre technologique en question.

The practice of epidural painkillers which suppress the pain of childbirth while maintaining full consciousness has increased rapidly in France in the last few years. For some this is a victory for women, giving them access to a fundamental right, others consider that it strengthens the growing hold of doctors and technical procedures over women's bodies. All agree that the choice should be offered to the woman, who finds herself in the role of an independent, rational actor, mistress of her own decisions. In this article, based on interviews with different women, we look at the conditions « in practice » in which epidurals are decided upon, and on the notion of «choice » central to how the actors view themselves.

This article uses as its starting point a news item in which the principal protagonists disagree as to the way in which embryos frozen after an in vitro procedure should be disposed of after the death of the woman's partner. The case is presented as a paradigm of assisted conception, emphasizing the radical transformation of the context in which parents, physicians and scientists are making decisions about embryos and bringing to light the redistribution of power and responsabilities among protagonists which this transformation implies. A comparison of the different elements of this case with the parameters established for decision-making in the French abortion law (1975) reveal the paramount importance of the physical location of the embryo (in or outside the woman's body) in defining the situation and understanding the conflict.

The analysis between those involved in new reproductive technology has often led to highlighting the strategies of those who are considered dominant : inventors, doctors, men. Here on the other hand we study the experience of women, making the hypothesis that there are differences in the search for medically-assisted reproduction reflecting the complexity of gender relations. Indeed, analysing women's trajectories on the basis of the medical records of a specialized hospital service reveal specific forms of behaviour : thus we see different strategies depending on the professional situation, the level of education, the position in relation to the hospital. With the growing medicalization of our society, the « duty to reproduce » is carried out on a stage in which gender relations, the relationship to work and the link to the medical institution are all factors to be considered.

This article is concerned with the emergence of two new types of patients in the medical reproductive technologies of IVF and prenatal surgery, the couple and the fetus. It argues that the conception of couples and fetuses as singular treatable patients is closely connected to the development of particular technologies. But these unconventional practices, that mix up the distinction between the technological and the natural as well as the distinction between one individual and another, are accompanied by specific discursive mechanisms that render the treatment of male problems and children's problems through women's bodies acceptable, or even natural and biologically inevitable. This paper is devoted to the analysis and deconstruction of such mechanisms.

This article explains the debate in Brazil around reproductive rights and underlines the advances and specific contradiction of two problems which are the current lot of Brazilian women : sterilization and illegal abortions. It highlights the fact that the gernalized practice of female sterlization and the number of backstreet abortions, which are a risk to women's health, reveal the failings of health policy at the level of reproductive choice and the population control policy. It shows the different directions taken by this discussion at the end of the 1990s and the need to reappropriate its dynamic of social transformation.

Since the Second World War, thirteen new contraceptives for women have been developed while the major methods of contraception available to men do not differ from those available to men over 400 years ago. Thus, responsibility for contraception and its risks to health is delegated primarily to women, not to men. This paper seeks to explore the role of different actors in rewriting this gender script. Special attention will be paid to how these actors configure the user of new contraceptive technologies, particularly contraceptives for men. Although most attention in social studies of technology is focused on innovator's role in configuring the user, this paper suggests that scientific experts are not the only actors who construct specific representations of the prospective user. In the case of male contraceptives, feminists and journalists have played an active role in articulating and demarcating the potential users of this technology in the making. The paper shows how scientists, feminists, and journalists have constructed a variety of representations of masculinity and male users. These representations function as tools in enhancing the cultural feasibility of a technology or they can be used to denounce the viability of a new technology.

Medically-assisted reproduction first and now the perspective of human cloning have provoked much discussion on the very essence of humanity, which they seem to attack, indeed to threaten with a fatal blow. However these are still minority and, in the case of cloning, hypothetical practices. But what is important here is not so much the concrete reality of the facts as the image of them and what is feared is above all the attack on the idea that humanity has of itself and its identity as a gendered, genealogical and mortal species. Without taking a position on the well-founded nature of these fears, the goal is to establish a schematic cartography of them and to analyse what, in the gender difference and the time used, is felt both to be fundamental to « the essence of humanity » and what is fundamentally weakened by the intervention of bio-medecine in reproduction.