Exploring Assisted Reproduction in Literature, Media, and the Arts
Academic Project Details
In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) birth rates in 2019 were three times higher than in 1991 when The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) began recording data. In 2019, almost 53,000 patients underwent treatment and there are vast increases over the past few years in use of this technology by same-sex couples as well as a tenfold increase in women freezing their eggs to future-proof their fertility. Assisted Reproductive Technology is, in many ways, a recent phenomenon. The first IVF baby was born in 1978. Our understanding and engagement with these technologies is continually evolving as we move toward the 50th anniversary of the first IVF birth.
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This project seeks to explore representations of assisted reproduction in the arts. It takes contemporary poetry as its initial focus. The language that we use to talk about infertility and technologies of assisted reproduction in the west have a long and complex cultural history and an equally tangled linguistic present. The last ten years have seen an increase in poetry written about conception through assisted reproductive technology (ART) with a marked increase in the last few years. How does a poet navigate culturally inherited metaphors and descriptions of their bodies and experiences in relation to ART?
