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In Mozambique, involuntary childlessness triggers immediate treatment seeking, especially on the woman's side. Treatment processes involve the activation and/or creation of situational social networks that provide emotional, instrumental, and informational support. These are formed through careful processes of disclosure management, and are embedded in social relations and local moral configurations of family making, reproduction, and healing. In this article I explore social networks involving friends, family, religion, and emerging biosocial relations, some or all of which are involved in Mozambican women's and couples' therapeutic navigations in the quest for fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India’s commercial surrogacy market literally produces humans and human relationships while sustaining global racial reproductive hierarchies. The post-colonial state’s aggressive anti-natalism echoes the broader global population control agenda framing the global South’s high fertility rates as a ‘global danger’ to be controlled at whatever cost, but is at odds with the neoliberal imperative of unrestrained global fertility tourism. Womb mothers (surrogates) subvert hegemonic discourses by taking control over their bodies and using their fertile bodies ‘productively’. But in controlling their own reproduction through decisions about fertility, sterilization and abortion in order to (re)produce children of higher classes and privileged nations, they ultimately conform to global neo-eugenic imperatives to reduce the fertility of lower class women in the global South. Surrogates creatively construct cross-class, -caste, -religion, -race and -nation kinship ties with the baby and the intended mother, disrupting hegemonic genetic and patriarchal bases of kinship, but fundamentally reify structural inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reading of the puzzle novel Vienna Blood, by Adrian Mathews, is juxtaposed to three ethnographic sketches of contemporary ethical plateaus or domains of ethical challenge--the challenges of informed public consent to new technologies, the seductions to do whatever is medically possible (sometimes at the expense of quality of life or the good death'). and the power of money in driving the biotechnological industries. Vienna Blood deals with precautionary germplasm modification and chemical camouflage justified as protection against ethnically-targeted biological warfare, and touches on a series of technologies such as new reproductive technologies, genetic engineering, and cryptographic attacks and defenses, as well as the ability to evade regulatory controls. Such technoscientifically informed novels are useful as cautionary tales, in exploring the complexity and interaction among new technologies, and the phantasmagoria that help drive new technologies. They are not so good at thinking through institutional development: a challenge for ethnography and new social theory. Ethnography, like novels, can function as checks on the mechanisms of abstraction and universalization that frequently bedevil the non-anthropological, non-cross-culturally or cross-temporally comparative, social sciences. Questions are raised about new or emergent biosocialities, forms of governance, and forms of cultural critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]