Chapter 8 Local Babies, Global Science

1. This chapter tends to focus on the main idea of gender.

2. gendered suffering, in which both moustafa and his first wife are victims of a cultural system in which hegemonic masculinities and femininities are instantiated through fertility.

3. new reproductive technologies take their toll on marriages and on the gender identities and status of re productively aging women who cannot be helped by these new technologies even if their husbands can.

4. Key word. "patriarchal bargain" agreeing before marriage to pursue high tech infertility treatments with her husbands to be in order to guarantee his future fatherhood.

5. gender shapes the experience pf infertility and its treatment for men and women differently.

6. Most of the ethnographic literature to date has examined the ways in which middle eastern men are subordinated by economic impoverishment or by the hierarchical and often humiliating relationships within all male institutions like the military for example.

7. several women in this study who were themselves infertile knew that their marriages were unstable, for their husbands had become cold,distant, and openly angry about the excessive time and expenses surrounding their treatment.

8. The many social and economic disincentives to divorce operating in Egyptian society and the conjugal connections among most childless couples, who experience deep bonds of love and commitment.

9. Chapter 9 Local Babies, Global Science

9.1. IVF in Egypt preform a kind of double stigmatization, whereby the very treatment designed to overcome an already stigmatizing health condition leads to an additional layer of stigma, secrecy and suffering.

9.2. Felt stigma involves the internalization of the societal evaluation of their condition on the part of the stigmatized, and their resultant sense that they have failed to live up to the standards of normality.

9.3. Enacted stigma, or the stigma that stems from intentional discrimination against the stigmatized is experienced almost exclusively by women in Egypt.

9.4. Egyptian men are simply freer from the kind of fertility scrutiny that is part and parcel of every Egyptian women's life.

9.5. Again even if a Egyptian man is hopelessly infertile, it is usually his fertile wife who is reminded of her childlessness by other women,

9.6. The desire to avoid untoward gossip is also tied to another desire, namely the desire not to be viewed as a pathetic and desperate infertile person.

9.7. Fears of envy, immorality, and the many other rationales from secrecy described here keep the vast majority of infertile Egyptian couples from revealing their test tube baby making trails, tribulations and even successes to the world.

9.8. Patients who are successful with IVF sometimes refer other infertile couples to the same IVF clinic is a phenomenon hat is increasing.

9.9. Due to the trails of pain and suffering many IVF patients could benefit from professional psychological intervention and support.

10. Both genders men and women express great desire for children.

11. Gender dynamics within marriage are, in and of themselves, among the mist fundamental arenas of constraint surrounding test tube baby making in Egypt.