ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes class, schooling and marriage as the three main axes to analysing the daily interactions reflected in the conversations with the mothers. A middle-class pregnancy tends to occur within the frame of reference of heterosexual marriage. A way to discover how social class differences impinge on the lives of the mothers in the study was to inquire into their financial capacity to access assisted reproduction. The mothers in the study who tried in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) and intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) confirmed that, effectively, a reading of social class could be attained through the ways in which biomedically-assisted reproduction occurs in Japan. Social class appears to extend beyond the borders of income differences or abstract categorisations. In the Japanese context, the notion that a particular class background deters reproduction appears an important component of the pronatalist agenda, which tends to foster financial and care incentives to palliate the economic impact of childbearing on lower-income households.
