Hello,

I’m Manon Lefèvre, an anthropologist (Yale PhD 2024) and current postdoctoral research fellow in the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

My scholarship sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and reproductive politics.

My first book project follows the reproductive scientists who grow and manage human embryos in IVF labs—within a landscape in which gestating and IVF embryos are increasingly legislated as unborn children.

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A printed image of two embryos just before they are transferred into a patient's uterus.

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, state lawmakers across the country have moved to enshrine embryos as legally protected persons. Though we know these laws harm pregnant people, they also threaten the sphere of infertility medicine—where medical providers fertilize eggs, culture human embryos, place them inside uteruses, freeze them in liquid nitrogen, and sometimes discard them in biohazard bins.

Cryogenic storage tanks holding frozen embryos.

IVF embryos hold tremendous value for the patients who hope to one day parent them. They are also meaningful to the professionals who cultivate them. As my research reveals, a diverse constellation of meanings surround in vitro embryos. However, these complex social meanings come into conflict with today’s legal and political landscape of reproductive medicine.

A still of a moving live embryo image taken with a time-lapse embryo incubator.

Current Project

In 2022 and 2023, I conducted participant observation with embryologists, physicians, and patients in IVF clinics in the northeast United States.

I found that as embryos are cultured (literally grown in laboratories), they are also multiply enculturated—imbued with complex social meanings that stem from diverging understandings of embryonic life.

In my project, I describe how embryos can be simultaneously ‘live’ reproductive cells, into potential life, unborn children, private property, medical waste, and more. Amid these cultural complexities, the scientists who grow and manage human embryos must increasingly navigate what it means to create ‘life’ in the laboratory today.

Patients' embryos appear on the time-lapse incubator screen for inspection. An embryologist studies the images, pointing at the screen with their pen.

Learn more

About Me

About Me
Research Program

Research Program
Teaching

Teaching
Get in touch

Get in touch