ABSTRACT
Consumers of private reproductive medicine in Britain during the 1980s were able both to take advantage of the many clinics eager to establish themselves in this rapidly expanding sector, and, indirectly of the tax incentives provided by the government to encourage such entrepreneurial activity. A compilation of such accounts, modelled on Montagu’s famous catalogue of Australian conception accounts could likewise be entitled Coming Into Being Among the Euro-Americans. In England, popular media accounts of assisted conception were distinctively formulaic in their narrative structure, combining established generic and sequential conventions to organise a telling tale of missed conceptions. Reproduction is, of course, a highly naturalised activity in the Euro-American cultural tradition. Into this highly naturalised domain, then, enters medical science, on behalf of the ‘desperate’ infertile couples for whom ‘life’s progression’ has been held hostage to the random injustice of nature’s lottery in making them unable to conceive.
