Reproductive health has emerged as an organizational framework that incorporates men into maternal and child health (MCH) programs. For several decades, medical anthropologists have conducted reproductive health research that explores male partners' effects on women's health and the health of...

In recent years, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has spread around the globe, including to the Middle East. Privacy, privatization, and the politics of patronage are all key issues affecting anthropological research in Middle Eastern hospital-based IVF clinics. IVF-seeking patients generally desire...

Infertility is a problem of global proportions, affecting on average 8-12 percent of couples worldwide. In some societies, however--particularly those in the "infertility belt" of sub-Saharan Africa--as many as one-third of all couples are unable to conceive. Factors causing high rates of tubal...

This essay explores an alternative paradigm for epidemiology, one which is explicitly informed by a feminist perspective. We intend to expand upon recent critiques and debates within the emergent fields of "critical", "popular", and "alternative" epidemiology to examine how epidemiology's...

Despite recent calls for greater collaboration between medical anthropologists and epidemiologists, examples of synthetic, interdisciplinary anthropological-epidemiological research are frankly rare, due in large part to perceptions among medical anthropologists that anthropology and...

Among the urban and rural poor of Egypt, female infertility is often attributed to kabsa (also known as mushahara), a form of 'boundary-crossing' by symbolically polluted individuals into the rooms of reproductively vulnerable women. When kabsa occurs, it causes the 'binding' of women's...