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Paper short abstract:

We describe the ways in which spiritual beliefs play important roles within high-tech ART in Ghana and South Africa. Based upon interviews with 40 informants in Ghana and 70 informants in South Africa we explore the spiritual interventions among staff and patients that accompany their treatment.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we describe the ways in which various forms of spiritual beliefs continue to play important roles within high-tech ART in Ghana and South Africa. Based upon fieldwork for two broader projects that included interviews with 40 informants in two clinics in Ghana and interviews with 70 informants and site visits to 7 clinics in South Africa; we explore the spiritual and religious interventions and concerns among staff and patients that accompany their medical interventions. We consider these practices and expressions of religiosity as part of the religious ‘heterotopia’ in which there is a blurring of boundaries between the sacred and ordinary in everyday life and a means through which the imaginaries of a future family are inscribed. They reinforce staff and patients as moral subjects who have done everything possible to assist in the uncertain vagaries of assisted reproduction—another form of care to enable, complement and enhance high tech intervention. In this paper we consider the creation of sacred spaces in the clinics, the positioning of clinicians, embryologists, patients and donors as moral subjects, rituals that form part of IVF practice and the new dilemmas of translation when ARTs travel to different contexts.