X Close

Repro@UCL

Menu

Repro Events

The first meeting of the group was in July 2019, with presentations from group members on topics ranging from reproductive technologies (such as egg-freezing and donor conception) and their associated well-being outcomes for families, as well as parenting culture and reproductive loss.

Please feel free to suggest something to either c.faircloth AT ucl.ac.uk or z.gurtin AT ucl.ac.uk if you are working on relevant topics and will be visiting London during the next academic year.

Upcoming events:

Dr Victoria Boydell, Lecturer in Women’s Health in the UCL IfWH, 12th November, 2-4pm, UCL
Never Done: Using and Refusing Reproductive Technologies.
A defining characteristic of contemporary women is the host of reproductive technologies they will use over their lifetimes. For example, many women in the UK will start taking the pill soon after they start menstruating, then use pregnancy and ovulation tests, assisted reproductive technologies and ultrasounds over their childbearing years and, some forty or so years later, they then use some regimen to manage menopause. This is historically unprecedented and surprisingly under-investigated. Though there is much thoughtful scholarship on specific reproductive technologies and specific reproductive events, there is little attempt to make sense of how these technologies intersect and interact with each other over the totality of life and what they tell us about the historical moment we live in. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data, I will share my analyses of the culminating use of reproductive technologies, from contraception through to IVF, and argue that these technologies are the handmaiden of neoliberal feminist ideals. However, what starts as enthusiastically embracing reproductive technologies to master the future gives way to failures, frustrations, and disappointment and then ‘opting out’ and creating alternate possibilities

Past events:

  • 15th October 2020 Dr Zeynep Gurtin (Lecturer, UCL Institute for Women’s Health) presented her work on The impact of Covid 19 on the experiences of patients undergoing fertility treatment

 

  • 18th March 2021 PhD Students Samuel Vermote and Xuerui Hu gave short presentations about their studies. Both Samuel and Xuerui  are studying lesbian motherhood

Samuel Vermote, SELCS/Gender and Sexuality Studies, ‘The (in)visible father: lesbian motherhood and artificial insemination in Britain from the seventies to late eighties’

 Xuerui Hu, UCL Social Research Institute: ‘Parenting in Intimate Relationships: An exploratory study on Chinese lesbians’ experiences of reproducing and raising children’

  • 10th June 2021: Alice Goisis and Alina Pelikh (UCL SRI), Partnership trajectories into Medically Assisted Reproduction

The number of people who undergo Medically Assisted Reproduction to conceive has increased considerably over the last three decades and worldwide more than 9 million MAR-conceived children have been born. Existing studies show that women who undergo MAR treatments tend, on average, to be older, in a more advantaged socio-economic position and in stable relationships. However, little is known about the type, duration and timing of these unions as well as women’s prior partnership histories. Previous partnership transitions might affect the life course stage and environment in which women are undergoing MAR as well as partnership stability in the longer term.

In this study, we investigate partnership environments among women undergoing MAR treatments, and examine the extent to which there are heterogenous pathways into MAR. Using unique data from Finnish population registers, we create longitudinal partnership histories between the ages of 16 to 40 for all women born in Finland 1971-1977 who underwent MAR to conceive (10.7% of the population). We focus on women who underwent MAR to conceive their first child, who represent 85% of all women who tried to conceive using MAR. We use Sequence Analysis techniques to identify the most common patterns and Relative Frequency Sequence Plots (RFS) to investigate heterogeneity within and between the groups. We identify 7 distinctive partnership pathways into first MAR treatments: 3 pathways of women undergoing treatments in partnership (89.3% of women) and 4 pathways of women without a partner (10.7% of women). The results highlight substantial heterogeneity in the partnership trajectories into MAR both among women undergoing treatments in partnerships as well as among an often neglected group of women undergoing treatments without a co-residential partner.

  • 7th December 2021 Sophie Zadeh, Associate Professor of Social Psychology in the Social Research Institute. Direct-to-consumer DNA testing and donor conception Sophie presented some of the findings from her ESRC study of donor conceived young adults in the UK. Her talk particularly focussed on the experiences and implications of direct-to-consumer DNA testing (i.e. Ancestry.com, 23andMe and similar resources) among donor conceived individuals who were conceived prior to changes to the HFE Act, which since 2005 have mandated that donors be identifiable to any children born as a result of their donation once they reach the age of 18.

 

  • 22nd September 2022 Charlotte Faircloth (Associate Professor in SRI) discussed a funding proposal to investigate motherhood- a short presentation followed by feedback on the draft bid.

 

  • 8th December 2022 Victoria Pratt (SRI) introduced her PhD study, exploring solo mothers’ experiences of maternity leave and early childcare, and Samuel Vermote (SELCS) presented a short paper based on his doctoral research into the history of lesbian motherhood via sperm donation. In particular, he spoke about how lesbians strategically navigate space to maintain distance between themselves and donors.  Samuel’s abstract here:

Choreographing self-insemination: Encounters between lesbian mothers and sperm donors in the home in the 1970s and 1980s

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, lesbians experimented with donor insemination to achieve pregnancy without penetrative sex with a man. Faced with heterosexist discrimination in fertility clinics, many of them elected to collect donor sperm and perform the procedure themselves. The practice mainly took place in their homes, avoiding the regulatory gaze of the medical profession and legal institutions. In this context, lesbians were both free and required to reinvent their relationships with the home as they strategically navigated its layered meanings to maintain the literal and figurative distance between themselves and the donor.

In this paper, I interrogate the ways in which domestic space featured as a central locus in lesbian mothers’ personal accounts of donor insemination. Following bell hooks’ conceptualisation of home, I approach this space as a site of safety and resistance where lesbians could subvert heteronormative notions of family building. Concentrating on the rituals these women performed before and after the insemination, I analyse how the home as a place of intimacy and comfort played an integral part in lesbians’ efforts to remove the abject and masculinist connotations attached to sperm. In some cases, however, the presence of the donor in the home was required for practical reasons, troubling this process. Foregrounding the choreography of sperm donation, I shed light on the ways in which lesbians managed their desired relationship with the donor in these instances by carefully dictating which rooms he was allowed to move through. In doing so, I hope to contribute to recent geographical studies discussing the workings of internal boundaries within the private sphere.

  • Vasanti Jadva 12.30-2pm, Thursday 16th March 2023 Assisted conception and the family: A summary of 20 years of research  ‘This talk will summarise some of the research studies I have been involved in since I began working in the field over 20 years ago. Topics will include families formed through gamete donation and surrogacy, donor connections, online websites, surrogates and egg and sperm donors.’