Conceiving fertility: Ethnic difference, reproductive politics, and the experience of infertility in Berlin (Germany)

Reproductive technologies, such as in vitro fertilization and intracytoplasmic sperm injection, used for the biomedical treatment of infertility have become a routine component of Germany's social medical system. German Turks, an ethnic group traditionally marked as overpopulaters in need of contraceptive treatments in the German imaginary, are among the most frequent users of infertility technologies in Germany. Minority populations, often due to their relative lack of access to medical care, are simply at greater risk for infertility complications. Despite the fact that the German medical system offers comprehensive health care to all German citizens and legal residents, my data and clinical research show that ingrained societal inequalities along ethnic, gender, and class lines can be seen in the provision of medical care.; This ethnographic study analyzes the relationship of the experience of infertility, ethnic difference, and the cultural politics of involuntary childlessness in the context of the modern German nation-state. The primary settings for the research were an urban fertility clinic and numerous homes of German Turkish and German couples undergoing biomedical therapies for infertility. Based upon eighteen months of fieldwork, the data collected and presented in this study are predominantly qualitative.; In this dissertation, I mark the articulations of the texture of German Turkish and German experiences of infertility and the cultural politics of ethnic inequality in the setting of the fertility clinic. In this way I hope to grasp better the relationship of pathologized perspectives on ethnicity and uneven provision of health care in clinical setting to the larger political patterns of ethnic exclusion in German society. I argue that medicalized fertility conventions in the clinical setting are both reflections and shapers of national conventions of exclusionary politics. Despite the efforts of health care providers to serve their increasingly cosmopolitan clientele, the German health care system is ill-equipped to deal with the rising number of foreign-born Germans who have unique understandings of health and illness etiologies and interpretations of biomedicine.