Gender, Religion, and In Vitro Fertilization

Abstract

Since the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first 'testtube baby' in 1978, the new reproductive technologies (NRTs) have spread around the globe, reaching countries far from the technology-producing nations of the West. Perhaps nowhere is this globalization process more evident than in the nearly twenty nations of the Muslim Middle East, where in vitro fertilization (IVF) centres have opened in nations ranging from small, oil-rich Bahrain and Qatar to larger but less prosperous Morocco and Egypt. Egypt provides a particularly fascinating locus for investigation of this global transfer of NRTs because of its ironic position as one of the poor, 'overpopulated' Arab nations