ABSTRACT
As noted in the introduction, this book is organised around a contrast between the historic importance of certainty about the ‘facts of life’ within anthropological accounts of conception models crossculturally, and the uncertainty now characterising the ‘biological facts’ of human reproduction in the context of achieved conception. This contrast is provided as a means of establishing a refractory perspective on the givenness of these ‘natural facts’ in relation to both kinship and gender theory. In this final chapter, I begin by locating this refraction in the context of parliamentary debate of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which reached its culmination during the period of fieldwork for this study, and which comprises an elaborate debate about ‘the facts of life’ not entirely dissimilar to those pursued within the ‘virgin birth’ debates in anthropology.1 By so doing, I propose to explore the workings of ‘the biological facts of human reproduction’ in terms of their cultural importance to contemporary British culture. In turn, this perspective ‘refracts’ on the importance of a specific model of ‘the facts of life’ in the history of British and Euro-American anthropology.
