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103 results in Reproduction

Page 1 of 6

  • Exhibit 2 - The Minotaur and Other Hybrids in Ancient Greece

  • from Exhibits
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 672-672

  • Summary

    These concluding reflections proceed by way of three broad, though selective themes. First, we consider the defining frameworks, reviewing the genesis and career of the old ‘generation’—the active making of humans and beasts, plants and even minerals—and of the modern ‘reproduction’—the more abstract process of perpetuating living organisms. The emphasis is on the different functions of these frameworks and how the stakes changed while the questions stayed much the same. Next we place the eighteenth-century emergence of population as an object of knowledge in relation to a longer history of multitudes and states and explore the uneven playing out of the modern logic of commensurability within supposedly closed groups. Then we reconstruct ideals and realities of control in the history of contraception and abortion, pregnancy and childbirth, asking how the politics changed as uncertainty gave way to risk. We conclude that the major changes add up to a long revolution that endorses the notion of a shift ‘from generation to reproduction’ and that exploring other themes, from the family and sexuality to inheritance and the law, would likely confirm as well as complicate this generalization. We end by pondering some general challenges and opportunities of long views.

  • 18 - The Emergence of Population

  • from Part II - Generation Reborn and Reformed
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 253-266

  • Summary

    The aggregate composition and structure of nations, states, and their constituent groups was the subject of sophisticated analysis and argument long before the rise of statistics, demography, and the modern state. This chapter outlines how, from Aristotle to the late eighteenth century, classical conceptions of the state and its memberships provided a subtle and ready basis for political thought about the role and importance of human numbers. The chapter explains why the role of fertility in population growth was not a priority in this classical model, and how the modern concept of population, based on statistics of the nation-state, led to a re-evaluation of the role of reproduction. Put simply, classical approaches were concerned with the processes that form and sustain groups in society, which involve much more than reproduction. The population of a state was composed of a hierarchy of memberships and the networks that sustained or divided them. The interest in what makes for stable polities led, in the seventeenth century, to development of quantitative measures within the classical model. By the early nineteenth century, analysis of quantitative relationships without reference to the history and formation of groups became widely accepted, giving fertility a new significance.

  • 6 - The Ancient Family and the Law

  • from Part I - Inventing Generation
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 81-94

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the ways law shaped procreative behaviour in the Roman world. As in classical Athens, Roman society was one in which marrying and having legitimate children to continue the line was fundamental, legally recognized and elaborated as such. In Rome, more particularly, the male head of the household enjoyed greater flexibility in ‘constructing kinship’, and planning for inheritance and succession, than in most legal systems. Divorce, remarriage and adult adoption were all integral to the enterprise, as well as considerable testamentary freedom, especially for women. Concern to produce legitimate children went beyond individual families, moreover, and the emperor Augustus legislated to promote marriage and childbearing, while Trajan adopted a financial approach, providing material rewards, allowances for children, in Italy. This chapter argues against the tendency in the modern scholarship to see Augustus’ aims as either demographic or moralistic: in the ancient world, encouraging procreation and restoring public morals went hand in hand. Nor should the apparent failure and unpopularity of the laws detract from the importance of the project: marriage and children are crucial to a community and one job of any good ruler is to emphasize that point.

  • 4 - Animal and Plant Generation in Classical Antiquity

  • from Part I - Inventing Generation
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 53-66

  • Summary

    The ancient domain of generation encompassed gods, humans, animals, plants, and some minerals, in hierarchical order. This chapter focuses on the animals and plants, an often overlooked, but vitally important area of both investigation and intervention in classical antiquity. The theoretical framework was most systematically set out by the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle and his pupil Theophrastus, with key aspects vigorously developed in more practical ways by a range of Latin agricultural writers in the Roman period. Generation was an activity shared by all living things (and some inanimate objects), and could, indeed be used to classify and rank these things. It required a male and female principle (though sex was not always necessary); and often involved seed (though plant seed was less seed-like than animal seed). The possibility and process of spontaneous generation was much discussed, as also themes of animal hybridity and plant grafting, along with more general matters of livestock breeding and crop production; all emphasizing the fluid continuity, and fecundity, of ancient notions of nature.

  • 30 - Fertility Transitions and Sexually Transmitted Infections

  • from Part IV - Modern Reproduction
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 443-456

  • Summary

    During the last century-and-a-half of human history fertility rates among most urbanizing populations have reduced dramatically. There was serious concern at the beginning of the twentieth century among some medical men and some feminists that this might in large part be due to the sterilizing consequences of ‘venereal diseases’ or sexually transmitted infections (STIs). With the development of effective medical treatments, that concern declined. Since the 1940s the widely held theory of demographic transition has instead proposed that both fertility and mortality—including from STIs—have fallen in developed countries as a consequence of ‘modernizing’ economic growth delivering rising per capita incomes, improved medical technology and rising consumer aspirations. However, research on mid-twentieth-century equatorial Africa and Oceania has demonstrated that exposure to globally ‘modernizing’ forces could result in rising disease incidence, with STIs causing significant levels of infertility. Recent research has also established estimates of STI prevalence in Britain before 1914, confirming contemporary concerns that these caused increased involuntary sterility. However, this research also confirms that most of the dramatic reduction in fertility in Britain and other advanced economies was voluntary, although possibly influenced to some extent by anxieties over STIs.

  • 36 - Technologies of Contraception and Abortion

  • from Part V - Reproduction Centre Stage
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 535-552

  • Summary

    The oral contraceptive pill still dominates histories of technology in the ‘sexual revolution’. ‘The pill’ was revolutionary for many, though by no means all women in the West, but there have always been alternatives and looking globally yields a different picture. By examining not only past innovations, but also the establishment and maintenance of a range of contraceptive and abortive practices around the world, this chapter reconsiders some widely held assumptions about what counts as revolutionary and for whom. The first two sections consider how demand for contraception and abortion was at first largely met by non-medical commercial suppliers and then, especially after 1960, by medical doctors supported by states and NGOs. The second half of the chapter is concerned with new surgical techniques of sterilization and abortion, then often made available through the population control and feminist movements, as well as prescription-only abortion and ‘morning-after’ pills, controversial drugs that reignited old debates about the boundary between contraception and abortion. The chapter concludes that, while the ‘sexual revolution’ did not see the sharp break in behaviours that is often imagined, public debates around ‘the pill’ did engender a much greater openness about technologies of contraception and abortion.

  • 37 - Hospital Birth

  • from Part V - Reproduction Centre Stage
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 553-566

  • Summary

    When and why did the overwhelming majority of Western women come to deliver their babies in hospitals? Though lying-in institutions had been established in the eighteenth century, only after World War II did hospital birth become the norm. This shift, which went hand in hand with population-wide surveillance and extensive monitoring, gained wide acceptance but was challenged by activists in the context of consumer and feminist critiques of paternalistic and patriarchal healthcare services. The chapter reviews historical writing on this hugely consequential transformation, and reflects on the state of play after the ‘birth wars’ of the 1970s and ’80s. Situating shifts in the management and experience of childbirth within wider developments in hospitals as institutions, it argues that the move to the hospital resulted from the interplay between the attitudes and expectations of women and their families, medical innovation, state policies, and broader social and economic change.

  • 17 - Family Resemblance in the Old Regime

  • from Part II - Generation Reborn and Reformed
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 241-252

  • Summary

    Drawing on ancient theories of generation, early modern natural philosophers and physicians reflected on family resemblance. We know less about how ordinary people perceived it. This chapter offers some insights by reconstructing the place of the linked notions of resemblance and dissimilarity in the old regime. How traits were understood to pass down the generations had social and political implications, as tracts on the origin of nobility, medical advice for begetting the desired children and paternity disputes reveal. Resemblance was framed in physical, moral and intellectual terms. Intersecting with discussions of the plasticity of nature and free will, why children did or did not resemble their parents encapsulated broader anxieties about individual and family identities, social mobility and challenges to traditional views: in the unpredictable process of generation, noble traits could appear unexpectedly. In the law courts, resemblance competed with other criteria, but informed testimonies and decisions. Though focusing on the seventeenth century, the chapter also sketches later developments, when the competition between theories of generation intensified and sons rebelled against fathers. Central to a cultural history of heredity, family resemblance emerges as the hinge connecting reflections on generation as a natural process and the changing relationships between generations.

  • 38 - Prenatal Diagnosis, Surveillance and Risk

  • from Part V - Reproduction Centre Stage
  • Edited by Nick Hopwood, University of Cambridge, Rebecca Flemming, University of Cambridge, Lauren Kassell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Reproduction
    Published online:
    16 November 2018
    Print publication:
    06 December 2018, pp 567-580

  • Summary

    Prenatal diagnosis—the practice of monitoring fetal development and spotting potential problems—has radically changed the experience of pregnancy for tens of millions of women worldwide. The development of prenatal diagnosis was the result of a partly contingent coming together of four technical innovations—amniocentesis (sampling of the amniotic fluid), the study of human chromosomes, the description of ‘markers’ of fetal anomalies in maternal blood and obstetric ultrasound—and a social innovation: the liberalization of abortion. The initial stimulus for the development of prenatal diagnosis was the wish to prevent the birth of children with hereditary pathologies. In the 1970s and 1980s the widespread diffusion of prenatal diagnosis was strongly favoured by the desire to reduce the incidence of Down syndrome, a condition redefined as a public health problem. In the late twentieth century, the improved resolution of obstetric ultrasound favoured the direct observation of numerous fetal anomalies, but also the identification of ultrasound ‘risk markers’—morphological changes that indicate an increased probability of fetal problems. In the early twenty-first century genomic techniques again expanded the possibilities for studying the living fetus, opening new questions and creating new dilemmas.

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