ABSTRACT
IVF practitioners and recipients of assisted reproduction will often refer to the new procreative technologies as pragmatic ways of bypassing childlessness rather than as effective treatments for the condition of infertility itself. Bypassing childlessness as technique is proffered in such contexts both as semantic guidance (the ‘protocol’ informing clinical instruction) and as a valid register of local explanation: here prospective parents and clinicians each appear to reinforce the other’s interest through mutual engagement and agreement. And so it is that the standard storyline of assisted conception is itself conceived at the clinic as a potted account of human ‘biology’. Should a couple be fortunate enough to achieve parenthood through the making of the euphemistic ‘take-home’ baby, this is generally attributable to an instrumental ‘fix’: to a view of one particular understanding of ‘nature’ working upon another such folk understanding of innate corporeal rhythms and bodily process.1
