When Time Becomes Biological: Experiences of Age-Related Infertility and Anticipation in Reproductive Medicine

This chapter investigates knowledge and practices relating to the ‘right timing’ in reproductive biomedicine in Switzerland. More precisely, it focuses on the effects of an anticipatory regime (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009) on women's experiences of age-related infertility. As assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) promise to intervene in the fixed ‘biological facts’ of fertility decline to render reproduction and the timing of motherhood more flexible, manageable and controllable, this chapter explores the effects of anticipation on women's experiences and negotiations of age-related infertility and ARTs. It sheds light on an anticipatory regime which can be called ‘motherhood as right timing’. It shows how, in this regime, the temporality of the lifecourse is brought back to a biological temporality and how expectations and injunctions towards managing and controlling time contain the possibility of their failure, as they are associated with a multiplication of uncertain, complex and resisting biologies. At the core of the practices and politics of anticipating fertility decline, there is a tension between acting upon and being acted upon time, which are embedded in a moral economy of responsibility and volition in which women are blamed, or blame themselves, for not anticipating what is by definition beyond individual control and anticipation.