Assisted reproduction has shifted from being an experimental technique to becoming a part of mainstream reproduction medicine. It has become a common and increasingly prevalent method of procreation in the 21st century. The boundaries of what is and is not normal in reproduction (and therefore desired, in the foucauldian sense) are not determined by what is medically possible; rather, they are bound by the legislation, public demand, and ethical and religious norms. Effort to redefine the boundaries determined by the legislation governing assisted reproduction occurred in the Czech Republic between 2008 and 2011. This effort was part of the so-called reformation package, which also included the Act on specific medical services. The Act regulates the conditions under which assisted reproduction is available. One issue that turned out to be controversial was the age barriers for women receiving assisted reproduction. Age barriers together with the issue of availability of assisted reproduction for women without a partner had not been previously clearly defined in the legislation. The main purpose of the paper is to analyse the discussions that occurred in the Parliament when the Act was debated. The paper will focus particularly on the three following issues: how was nature and normality discussed in the context of assisted reproduction; how were these topics related to nature and to society; and how does the adopted Act reflect on the position of a woman as an actor of reproduction.
The article is based on research conducted with young children, and uses methods of data collection that are suitable and appropriate for children (focus groups, writing, and drawing). Theoretically grounded in a child-perspective research, we intend to contribute to the debate on the transition of gender order in the Czech environment. The text focuses particularly on the issue of gender roles both in the family of participating children and in their projections of roles of individual family members. An analysis of children’ views shows that they identify with the gender categories of “men” and “women” and construct these categories as opposite and firmly bounded. Despite the awareness of conflicts and problems that the unequal distribution of domestic tasks can bring, children mostly support the traditional division of roles and refer to them as normal, natural and corresponding to the physical characteristics of men and women. On the other hand, egalitarian attitudes (the view of division of roles as not depending on gender) are expressed by some children, more often by children from the urban school than from the village school., Lenka Slepičková, Michaela Kvapilová Bartošová., and Obsahuje bibliografii
While fertility rates in Western countries are low and the number of people who will remain voluntarily childless is increasing, more and more couples are seeking medical treatment for infertility. Fertility problems transcend the boundaries of medicine and challenge the traditional positivistic understanding of health and illness and the authority of scientific and objective medicine. The circumstances for coping with infertility are not universal and depend instead on the given society and on cultural values. Studying infertility means studying every important institution of our society: the institutions of marriage and the family, the institution of parenthood, medicine, and so on. While American and other Western social scientists have studied social aspects of infertility for many years, in the Czech Republic the topic remains the domain of medicine. This article focuses on basic concepts employed in the study of infertility and involuntary childlessness in sociology. It presents and summarises relevant concepts such as stigmatisation, social exclusion, identity problems, and gender differences in the response to infertility. It presents the debate over explaining the terms of infertility and (involuntary and voluntary) childlessness. It shows how the position of involuntary childlessness has been changing as the problem has increasingly come to be dealt with in medical terms and as high-tech medical treatments for infertility have been developed. Finally, the article opens up the topic for debate and raises the question of potential methods of research.
Reproductive medicine is one of the most progressive and most popular medicine branches. Its success and rapid development, together with the primacy of biological or genetic ties in the western construction of family is considered the main reason for decreasing popularity of adoption as the way of resolving involuntary childlessness. These assumptions are confronted with empirical findings about Czech population. The respondents of the survey conducted in the Czech households were asked about their preferences in the hypothetical situation of being confronted with physical infertility and about their attitudes towards various ways of solving it. The data showed that while infertility is actually constructed as a medical problem requiring high technology medical treatments, the adoption would not be considered a choice of last resort, after the failure of all procedures of artificial reproduction, including using donor gametes or embryo. Further, the data does not support the hypothesis of significant gender differences in these attitudes.