Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Case Study of Traveling Abroad to Access Reproductive Technologies

该项目调查了土耳其公民在体外受精前使用植入前遗传学诊断选择后代性别的问题。公民前往北塞浦路斯进行这些手术，这在土耳其是非法的。拟议的研究将使用多地点人种学来探索家庭是利用性别选择技术来实现传统的重男轻女标准，还是更现代、更平衡的家庭。因此，该研究探讨了道德多元主义存在的程度，这意味着在多大程度上存在着多种价值观，这些价值观本质上是同样基本的，但彼此冲突。这些伦理问题将被置于一个更大的社会政治背景下，即穆斯林占多数的地中海世俗国家。这项研究的结果将通过一个开源数字存储平台，以及英语和土耳其语的专业期刊和会议向广大公众传播。本研究对土耳其跨界植入前遗传学诊断进行非治疗性性别选择，要求对生殖技术、跨民族主义、家庭制造、生物伦理和性别进行社会分析。它关注两个核心的社会科学问题。一个问题是土耳其公民如何理解、利用和使性别选择作为一种生殖方式在道德上是适当的。另一个问题是，这些道德谈判揭示了当代土耳其性别和家庭意识形态的紧张或转变。拟议的研究将有助于通过科学和技术研究了解生殖技术的女权主义研究，人类学中关于生殖旅游的新兴奖学金和土耳其性别、家庭和民族主义的民族志，考虑到与全球技术和人员流动以及国家施加的限制有关的跨国主义。

General Audience Summary This project investigates the quest of Turkish citizens to select offspring gender prior to in vitro fertilization using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. Citizens travel to Northern Cyprus for these procedures, which are illegal in Turkey. The proposed research will use a multi-sited ethnography to explore whether families are utilizing gender selection technology to achieve traditional son preference standards, or more modern, balanced families. As such, the research explores the extent to which moral pluralism is present, meaning the extent to which there are multiple values essentially involved that are equally fundamental, yet conflict with one another. These ethical issues will be situated within a larger socio-political context, Muslim-majority secular countries of the Mediterranean. The results of this research will be disseminated to a broad a public using an open source digital repository platform, as well as to professional journals and conferences in both English and Turkish.Technical Summary This study of Turkish cross-border pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for non-therapeutic gender selection calls for the social analysis of reproductive technology, trans/nationalism, family making, bio-ethics, and gender. It focuses on two central social-scientific questions. One concerns how gender selection is understood, utilized and made morally appropriate by Turkish citizens as a mode of reproduction. The other concerns what tensions or transformations in contemporary Turkish ideologies of gender and family are revealed by these moral negotiations. The proposed research will contribute to feminist studies of reproductive technologies informed by Science and Technology Studies, the emerging scholarship on reproductive tourism in anthropology and the ethnography of gender, family and nationalism in Turkey, considering trans-nationalism in relation to global flows of technology and people as well as constraints posed by the state.