Doctoral Dissertation Research: Demographic Impacts of State-Sponsored Medical Technologies

尽管自体外受精（IVF）（当今最有效的不孕症治疗方法）发明以来，关于不孕症的生物培养条件的知识发生了巨大变化，但生殖技术的经验可能会有很大差异。具有原始主义政策目标的政府可以大力利用和管制辅助生殖技术，如体外受精；根据使用这些生殖技术的人的不同，这些政策可能会对人口产生重大影响。该项目旨在培养一名研究生如何进行严谨的实证科学实地调查，探讨面临社会压力的少数民族使用国家资助的医疗技术所带来的社会、文化和人口变化。在印第安纳大学Sarah Phillips博士的指导下，Safak Kilictepe将对试管受精和少数民族地位之间的关系进行研究。该研究的背景是允许研究人员调查生活在社会政治变化的环境中的不育少数民族妇女如何经历其不孕症。研究人员将探讨少数民族妇女如何应对和利用政府监管的试管婴儿技术来实现自己的生殖利益，并验证自己作为女性和母亲的性别身份，她们生活在一个妇女的社会经济地位严重依赖于她们的生育能力的社会中。这项研究将在土耳其进行，土耳其是世界上增长最快、监管严格的试管婴儿市场之一。研究人员将在土耳其首都（4个月）和东南部一个以库尔德少数民族为主的城市（8个月）进行12个月的人种学研究。方法包括参与观察、访谈（108人）、文本和统计数据分析。研究结果将予以散发，以指导决策者、从业人员和学者编写有关生殖和生殖技术的教材和（或）制定有关生殖和生殖技术的政策。

Even though knowledge about the bio-cultural conditions of infertility has changed dramatically since the invention of in vitro fertilization (IVF), the most effective infertility treatment today, experiences with reproductive technologies can vary significantly. Assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as IVF can be heavily leveraged and regulated by governments with protonalist policy objectives; and depending on who avails themselves of these reproductive technologies, those policies can have significant demographic impacts. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, explores what social, cultural, and demographic changes result from the use of state-sponsored medical technologies by ethnic minorities faced with social pressure reproduce. Safak Kilictepe, under the supervision of Dr. Sarah Phillips of Indiana University will conduct research on the relationship between IVF and ethnic-minority status. The research is situated in a context that allows the researcher to investigate how infertile ethnic minority women living in socio-politically changing environments experience their infertility. The researcher will explore how ethnic minority women, who live in societies in which women's socioeconomic status significantly depends on their fertility, respond to and make use of government regulated IVF technology to achieve their own reproductive interests and validate their own gendered identities as women and mothers. The research will take place in Turkey, one of the world's fastest growing and tightly regulated IVF markets. The researcher will conduct twelve months of ethnographic research in the capital city (four months) and a southeastern city (eight months) dominated by a Kurdish minority population in Turkey. The methods include participant observation, interviews (with 108 individuals), and textual and statistical data analysis. Findings will be disseminated to guide policy makers, practitioners, and scholars developing education materials for, and/or making policies about reproduction and reproductive technologies.