Marcia C. Inhorn and Frank van Balen have been instrumental in creating the realm of “new thinking” alluded to in their subtitle. They have contributed not only with their own groundbreaking scholarship but also by identifying and bringing together scholars from around the world to work on this important topic—at international conferences (Amsterdam, 1999, and Ann Arbor, 2004) and in this valuable collection.

Inhorn and van Balen introduce the book with a discussion of the reasons the topic has been relatively neglected and of their desire to counter “the predominant Western view of infertility as a yuppie complaint of little concern to the rest of the purportedly overpopulated developing world” (p. 7). Part 1 also includes a chapter by Margarete Sandelowski and Sheryl de Lacy, in which they describe the various ways the “infertile” in the United States are represented—as emotionally distressed, socially handicapped, cultural dupes, and heroic suffers. Charis M. Thompson provides a useful historical overview of feminist theorizing on infertility, and van Balen explores the psychologization of infertility (including theories about women’s psychologies being the cause of their problems and more recent theories about the psychological stress that infertility inflicts on women, including the pressure to participate in psychological studies!).

Part 2 begins with an excellent essay by Arthur L. Greil on the ways infertile women in the United States understand their bodies (as machines, as emblems of self, as property) and the consequences of these understandings for their experience. This section also includes a chapter by Gay Becker on how couples decide whether and who to tell about having used donor insemination. In her chapter on the marital consequences of infertility innorthern Vietnam, Melissa J. Pashigian focuses on the special hardships for women in patrilineal–patrilocal societies. Gwynne L. Jenkins offers a well-crafted account, written in collaboration with a Costa Rican couple, of the process that led the couple to adopt after years of childlessness. There is also a masterful narrative analysis by Catherine Kohler Riessman (who literally “wrote the book” on narrative analysis) of three infertile Indian women now past childbearing age.

Part 3 focuses on Africa’s “Infertility Belt.” The essay by Lori Leonard makes clear the difficulty of measuring infertility given the discrepancies between local and international definitions (e.g., only married women are counted by international definitions, but because one of the common consequences of infertility is divorce, many infertile women are excluded in assessments of frequency). Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg compares international, national, and local attitudes toward reproduction and offers a complex picture of the way that concerns with population control and the need to produce (workers, subjects, citizens, and families) have interacted over time. Trudie Gerrits’s study of the Macua of Mozambique shows how matrilineality, especially when combined with matrifocality, protects infertile women from some of the hardship normally associated with infertility.

Part 4 focuses on the use of new reproductive technologies (NRTs). In her previous work, Inhorn described the problems that infertility poses for the 12 percent of Egyptian married couples who suffer from it and the range of enthnomedical and biomedical therapies that infertile Egyptian women use to try to overcome it. Here she focuses on the culturally shaped beliefs about the body that inhibit the use of NRTs in Egypt. In contrast, Susan Marcia Kahn focuses on how NRTs, including artificial insemination with non-Jewish donor sperm, have been embraced by ultraorthodox Jews in Israel, the country with the highest number of infertility clinics per capita in the world. She describes how these technologies are being used to maintain exceptionally high birth rates (one woman used in vitro fertilization when she had difficulty getting pregnant with what would be her sixth child) and, in contrast with other essays in this collection, which argue that infertile women are not “simply victims” but active agents, Kahn raises the question of how much choice infertile ultraorthodox women really have to say no to these invasive interventions. Lisa Handwerker shows how NRTs, including donor sperm, prenatal diagnosis, and sex selection, are being used in China as part of the “new eugenics” movement to ensure, in light of the one-child policy, that only superior children are produced. Aditya Bharadwaj takes a different tack in his essay, which focuses on a bitter and protracted battle in India about which doctors deserve the credit for the first test-tube baby there.

As a scholar of pregnancy loss, I was struck by how many of the essays included material on miscarriage and stillbirth. One would not know this from the index, which is, as is so often the case these days in collected volumes, skimpy. Inhorn and van Balen have taken a substantial step toward addressing the “scholarly lacuna” on infertility cross-culturally. I hope that a similar achievement with regard to the experience of pregnancy loss “around the globe” will soon follow.