Perceptual-Epistemological Judgment: Embryologists Examining Life

Assisted fertilization or in vitro fertilization (IVF) is the clinical branch of reproductive medicine, the study of human reproduction and the female and male reproductive capacities. In the post-World War II period much research effort has been dedicated to understanding how human reproduction can be disciplined and controlled, very much in the face of the global population explosion that was much discussed in the 1950s and 1960s. Not until the late 1960s did pioneers of assisted fertilization therapies start to use the knowledge produced in this field to actively promote rather than to curb human reproduction. Researchers such as Robert Edwards in the United Kingdom realized that the total number of children born is not the essential problem but rather the birth of unwanted children. Human reproductive capacities are unevenly distributed, and while one family in a developing country may have to provide six or seven children, the neighboring family may have no children, which is just as much a social problem, inasmuch as the children provide for their elderly parents in many parts of the world. In 1978, the first baby conceived on through assisted fertilization was born in the United Kingdom. By the mid-1980s, assisted fertilization was established as a clinical practice in many countries.