the Female Body GOVERNING

“Doing What Comes Naturally . . .” 237
IVF baby, Louise Brown, IVF has long been supplanted by “designer
babies,” preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD; see Braude, Pickering,
Flinter, & Ogilvie, 2002), stem cell research, and cloning as the focus of
tabloid reproductive horror stories. Indeed, patients, doctors, and the
public increasingly attach the epithet “normal” to IVF to mark a distinction
between the mainstream fertility treatment and those newer, more
controversial technologies to which the laboratory technique of IVF is
central. In the United Kingdom alone, 72 clinics are licensed to perform
IVF, treating well in excess of 20,000 women a year, 1 and in May 2005,
as part of a scientifi c conference on preimplantation genetics, a concert
was held in London to celebrate the lives of the estimated 2 million
babies worldwide who have been conceived using IVF. 2 The increasingly
mainstream status of IVF, and its normalization in relation to other
more socially controversial technologies, produces a strong imperative
to engage with treatment. This imperative is given a particular dynamic
in the United Kingdom because of two key factors. First, fertility treatment
in the United Kingdom is subject to one of the strictest systems of
regulation in the world, under the aegis of the Human Fertilization and
Embryology Authority (HFEA). This governance at the national level
provides legitimacy for individual engagements with IVF:
Angela: But I would say that probably because you know that the
HFEA is spoken about, you know that it’s being controlled. You
know you’re not, you know, there’s not some wacky doctor doing, you
know . . . you know that you are in a controlled environment, that
it is regulated, they’re not allowed to put more than three embryos
back in and all that sort of thing.
The second normalizing factor is the provision of treatment within
the NHS, which is subject to signifi cant funding constraints, and
consequently, debates about what constitutes a treatment priority are
a recurrent feature of health discourse in the United Kingdom. A
2001 report by the British Medical Association (BMA), for example,
categorized fertility treatment alongside tattoo removal, gender reassignment,
and drugs for baldness and impotence as draining resources away
from essential services, and therefore as potential candidates for exclusion
from NHS provision. 3 However, on August 26, 2003, the National
Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) 4 issued the second draft of
the clinical guidelines on the assessment and management of fertility
problems. The draft guidelines propose the provision of three “fresh”
IVF cycles for women. In response to these guidelines, in February 2004,
Health Secretary John Reid announced that all women younger than