School of Social and Political Science

Description

In rural Haryana, India, the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) specialist, Dr Rajeshi, is identified as the ‘rogue doctor’ in providing, and facilitating, assisted conception to elderly infertile couples who are otherwise refused IVF by other doctors and fertility specialists. Linked to the emerging practice of assisting birth for women and men in their late 60s and early 70s in India, this paper is inspired by the idea of ‘legitimate reproduction’ within a supposed ‘aberrant’ reproductive body. The infertile body is imagined as ‘lacking’ and ‘incomplete’, and therefore eligible for intervention by assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) such as IVF. However, in the practice of ARTs in India is the emerging discourse of ineligibility or the ‘rogue’ body, which despite their ‘impossibility’ to reproduce, still demands the intervention of IVF. Of significance is the rhetoric within ARTs that constructs the reproductive body in terms of eligible and ineligible decline. Thus, the ‘biological clock’ operates to garner hysteria regarding declining fertility, to be rescued by assisted reproduction, while reproduction beyond a certain age is deemed unacceptable.

In this process, I wish to reflect upon how time and temporality come to be framed in the act of roguishness: in facilitating conception amongst the aged and ageing. In many ways there is a sense of what I like to call ‘runaway’ temporality that threatens to upend conventional notions of decline.

From fieldwork data collected in Haryana amongst aged couples seeking, and having children through IVF, this paper attempts to answer the following questions. What kind of reproductive body seeks assisted conception? How is going ‘rogue’ understood and manufactured within infertility discourse in India? In the process, this paper seeks to contribute to emerging research on age and reproduction as imagined in practices that unsettle biological clocks such as egg freezing and postmenopausal reproduction.