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Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics

Online ISBN:
9781479818648
Print ISBN:
9781479818587
Publisher:
NYU Press
Book

Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics

Risa Cromer
Risa Cromer
Purdue University
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
5 September 2023
Online ISBN:
9781479818648
Print ISBN:
9781479818587
Publisher:
NYU Press

Abstract

A countless number of human embryos created using in vitro fertilization and frozen in fertility clinic freezers across the United States have become the subject of ethical, political, and practical debate focused on one question: What should happen with them? In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians developed embryo adoption as a proposed solution that “saves” embryos. Embryo adoption is a family-making practice that facilitates the donation of unused embryos through an adoption-like process to recipients who plan to gestate and parent any children born. Yet, a closer look inside the world of embryo adoption reveals that it strives to “save” more than embryos. Based on six years of ethnographic research, this timely book details how embryo adoption became part of the Christian Right’s pro-life political playbook for conceiving a Christian nation. Conceiving Christian America is the first book to trace how this powerful social movement aims to transform the way we think about frozen human embryos, reproductive rights, and the future of the United States. It features gripping stories from professionals, participants, and supporters motivated to save embryos to save the US nation. This book draws critical attention to the seductions and harms of white saviorism that animate everyday life in embryo adoption and its political ambitions. The Christian Right’s pro-life movement gained traction through embryo adoption in the twenty-first century. This book explains why we ought to be wary of the reproductive politics of white saviorism in the post-Roe world.

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