Paper short abstract:

Drawing on our recent fieldwork in private fertility clinics in Ghana, Mali and Uganda, we focus in this presentation on the practice of (prolonged) bed rest after embryo transfer to understand the differences of medical views and practices among these countries and clinics.

Paper long abstract:

Globalization of biomedicine involves the distribution, use and appropriation of various technologies, including assisted reproductive technologies. Medical anthropologists have shown and argued that biomedicine is not a 'monolithic enterprise' (Lock and Kaufert 1998): local factors reshape the way globalized technologies are offered and used in particular local sites. This is also what we observed during our fieldwork in private fertility clinics in Ghana, Mali, and Uganda: medical views, procedures and practices are not applied in a standardized way, but differ among countries and among clinics. In the anthropological literature there seems to be an inclination to contrast such findings to synthesized `international standards` (mostly European and North-American ones), referring mainly to the authors` countries of origin. In this paper we try to avoid this inclination; contrarily, we describe and make an attempt to understand the inter-African and inter-clinic diversity. We focus on the diversity in views and practices regarding the issue of (prolonged) bed rest after embryo transfer, which is the last stage of In-Vitro-Fertilization. We will see that providers not only have different arguments for their divergent practices, but that women also react differently to these practices. While the women's reactions reflect both their appreciation of the clinic's practices and their hesitations about these practices, they also point to their dependence on the clinic staff to be able to deliver the child (or children) they so much want.