New Reproductive Technologies

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What cultural resources do people draw upon to make sense of new forms and technologies of reproduction? New reproductive technologies have altered how we perceive traditional conception. Yet, the question that has been posed is what cultural resources do we look at in order to understand new forms and technologies of reproduction? Although it is a new technology it has had different reactions from within different cultures. Firstly an exploration of these new forms and technologies of reproduction and how they are received by certain cultures. This essay will then discuss how different cultures look to certain cultural resources in order to understand new reproductive technologies. This essay will argue that religion, history and tradition play a pivotal role in people’s opinions of new reproductive technologies and how they are received. Before discussion continues about the cultural resources that people draw upon, definitions of new reproductive technologies (NRT) need to be established. There are many different types of new reproductive technologies. The first of which is in vitro fertilisation, ‘which involves the fertilisation of an egg with sperm in a laboratory’ (Bos and Balen, 2010, 429). This process entails the fertilisation of an egg with sperm that then gets transferred into the mother’s uterus. There are a number of different combinations of this process, either using the father’s sperm with another woman’s egg, or vice versa. By having this new technology it allows couples that have one infertile partner to have children that are biologically related to the fertile partner. The other type of NRT is surrogacy, which ‘acquires the status of a solution for involuntarily childless couples where the woman is infertile. A “surrogate mother” gets pregnant, bears and gives birth to the child, and then hands it over to the intended parents’ (Zipper and
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