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This book examines how ideals of masculinity have skewed the science of male reproductive health and our understanding of men's relationship to human reproduction. It looks at the conditions under which male reproductive-health needs have emerged on the public scene at the turn of the century, the charged public responses to such exposure, and their implications on how we think about men's relationship to human reproduction and social relations between men and women.

This chapter examines the first element of reproductive masculinity: the assumption that men are secondary in biological reproduction. It analyzes the history of debates over men's role in human reproduction, from the ancients through to the twentieth century. Biological arguments were often used to justify a social division of reproductive labour between men and women, to assert men's power over reproductive decision making, or to justify women's primary natural responsibility for the work of bearing and raising children. The chapter suggests that biological knowledge of reproduction has been, and remains, inseparable from the social relations of reproduction and the social constructions of masculinity.

This chapter looks in detail at the four chapters following Leviticus 11, which take off from the theme of reproduction therein to form a distinct literary unit: Leviticus 12 is about blood impurity of a woman menstruating or giving birth, and then two chapters on leprosy (Leviticus 13 and 14), are followed by Leviticus 15 on genital discharges from men or women: all sources of impurity. The peroration in Leviticus 15: 33 closes a ring by referring back to the opening of chapter 12 – the impurity of menstruation, and with this reading the whole section becomes a formal abba pattern. It is a mistake to ignore the connections between these chapters: the first and last are directly about the reproductive process, and God’s compassion has been demonstrated in Leviticus 11 by the rules declaring it ‘abominable’ to harm corpses of the teeming, fertile creatures of water and air. The next set of rules returns to impurity, hence they are about the tabernacle: the writer has returned to the theses of Leviticus 11 on the dangers of impurity in the approach to the tabernacle. In Leviticus’ favourite literary form, chiastic composition, the meaning is at the pivot or the middle of a series of parallel verses: on either side of the sections on leprosy there stand supporting verses on human reproduction, like steps or like framing pillars, and within the series on a leprous person, two additional afflicted objects are introduced, a leprous garment, and a leprous house; the alternation makes an abab pattern; this signals a return to the body/ microcosm.

This chapter examines the Italian experience in relation to the governance of human reproduction. Successive Italian governments have tended to avoid addressing issues of bioethical controversy in an objective and honest manner due to a fear of a conservative backlash and a subsequent loss of political support. This sums up the manner in which bioethical issues have been dealt with, or rather not dealt with in Italy over the past twenty years. Instead of attempting to gain community consensus on an issue and working towards a solution which expresses the values of all sectors of society, governments have tended to see such matters in very simplistic terms: either they are morally supportable or morally suspect. In all this the pluralist state's moral guide has been the Vatican.

Successful human reproduction and development is dependent upon men and women undergoing a series of highly interrelated and conditional biologic processes, many of which delineate critical or sensitive windows of human development. This chapter provides an overview of six sensitive windows including folliculogenesis, spermatogenesis and steriodogenesis, menstruation, ovulation and the fertile window, implantation window, and the intrauterine environment. Understanding the biology of these sensitive windows has methodologic implications for study design and the timing of data and biospecimens collection, particularly when attempting to identify fecundity determinants or reproductive and/or developmental toxicants. Sensitive windows are highly relevant for assessing the early origins of health and disease including the elucidation of epigenetic mechanisms that impact human reproduction and development across the lifespan and, possibly, across generations.

There is virtually no governmental regulation of human reproduction in the United States. There are three reasons for this regulatory vacuum: historic, economic, and political. Historically, although physicians have been licensed by the individual states for almost a hundred years, states have permitted the medical profession itself to define the practice of medicine, including what procedures (such as new reproductive technologies) are medical. Economically, the United States is in the grips of free market medicine. Politically, the continuing national debate on abortion, most recently focusing on so-called ‘partial birth abortion’ statutes aimed at outlawing a specific method of abortion, has profoundly diluted public support for government regulation of anything related to pregnancy. Although all three reasons are important, abortion politics continues to dominate anti-government interference with reproduction rhetoric. This chapter begins with an overview of U.S. abortion law since 1973, the year the most important health case in the country’s history, Roe v Wade, was decided.

This chapter deals with the problems of deciding who should be treated as a child’s ‘parent’. At first, there was no alternative to using ‘presumptions’ — for example, that a husband was the father of any child born to the wife during the marriage — but the twentieth century saw the development of increasingly sophisticated and reliable scientific procedures determining who is genetically related to whom. The development of artificial insemination (and, latterly, other techniques of Human Assisted Reproduction) has made the attribution of legal parentage solely on the basis of genetic identity unsatisfactory.

This chapter identifies the sources of fears and concerns of medieval and pre-modern people. These include bodily illness, disease, and injury; human reproduction and fragile childhood, loss of reason, threats to crops and livestock, and lost or stolen property.

The symposium “Choices on Our Conscience” was more than just an inaugural event for the Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute for the Study of Human Reproduction and Bioethics. It was said to be “a symposium on human rights, retardation, and research.” This chapter provides a detailed account of the said symposium.

New technological achievement in human reproduction are emerging at a dizzying speed, with very little or no opportunity for the public to debate their merits. The first and probably most anticipated is the embryonic life discourse. Abortion for cystic fibrosis, preimplantation genetic diagnosis for deafness, and human genetic engineering for cystic fibrosis are all for one group of persons acceptable because they improve the health of someone, be it through bringing a healthier person into the world or modifying an existing person to make them and their offspring healthier. On the other hand, the pro-lifers do not place the same issues in their health-related domain. They oppose abortion and preimplantation genetic diagnosis for cystic fibrosis, but they do approve of human genetic engineering for cystic fibrosis. Their “health” domain is better described as “medicine” and is limited to reproductive genetic technologies (RGTs) where currently existing people are modified to help the health of themselves and their offspring.

This chapter discusses John Milton’s account of prelapsarian existence in Paradise Lost, which implies that the first human sexual reproduction occurred between God and Adam in an act that overwhelmed Adam and produced Eve as a new sexual partner for man. Based on the Lucretian meditation on mixed modes of generation, the first act of sexual reproduction makes a materialist and philosophical contribution to the discussion of Milton’s construction of paradise as a place resistant to but tempted by obsolete and “fallen” forms of categorization.

This dialogue provides a fictional account of a lecture series featuring Francis Davenport, a stem cell scientist, and Laura Murphy, a Catholic-educated Ph.D. bioethicist who specializes in reproductive ethics. Moderated by Dr. Rebecca Franklin, the lecture series tackles the promise offered by artificial oocytes from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from adult tissues as well as the daunting opportunities for abuse of “unnatural” sperm and eggs. Donaldson reprogrammed a mouse skin cell into an embryonic-like stem cell and from it made fully functioning sperm and egg cells. His goal is to use the same technique for producing human gametes from adult cells. Murphy recently published a book titled Embryonic Tyranny: How Science Ignores the Sanctity of Life. Here Davenport and Murphy discuss the scientific and medical reasons to create gametes from adult cells; differences between natural primordial germ cells and oocytes and those reprogrammed from skin cells; whether the approach can be used to treat infertility and its ethical implications for human reproduction; and how viable sperm and eggs can be obtained from an adult skin cell.

Early modern bodies, we are told, were conceived of as ‘fluid’ and ‘permeable’, or ‘mutable’ and ‘fluxable’, because their constituent humours were always and everywhere at the mercy of the immediate surroundings. This chapter challenges this notion. As much as the seventeenth century’s ambiguous understanding of human reproduction may seem ‘soft’, a common if not dominant view was that complexions were both innate, enduring, and, in a fundamental way, inherited. Published reckonings of professional astrologers such as William Lilly and John Gadbury; the carefully scripted, autobiographical calculations of William Bellgrave and Jonathan Hall, otherwise obscure artisans; little-studied case notes regarding humble individuals kept by those, like Jeffrey Le Neve or Richard Saunders, who considered themselves as much mathematicians or physicians – all these materials point to a widespread belief that humoral complexions and their associated body types were established from birth. The body’s mutability was a preoccupation, because of the difficulty of maintaining these self-same, innate constitutions. The chapter tests the persistence of what we might term an astro-humoral world-view by re-examining the controversy surrounding the most significant birthday of the late Stuart era: the arrival of a prince of Wales on 10 June 1688.