Planning for the Family in Qatar: Religion, Ethics, and the Politics of Assisted Reproduction

During research in Qatar with practitioners in assisted reproduction and infertility medicine, I found that across the broad range of views they expressed about their approaches to consulting with patients, there was something shared: that their work with assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) entailed taking up moral and ethical positions. In this paper, I draw on interviews with medical professionals to analyse the local moral worlds which shape the practice of assisted reproduction. I provide an analysis of how professionals position themselves amid the complex ethical, moral, and cultural landscape in which ARTs in Qatar are situated. In developing my analysis of how these positionings involve a striving to be virtuous, I contribute to anthropological understandings of the complexities of everyday negotiations of moral practice. This is a process, I argue, that reveals both the interplay between self-construction and professional practice and the multidimensionality of the underexplored ART context in Qatar.