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

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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.