Hi,
I’m Manon Lefevre, an anthropologist of science and medicine (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 bridges medical anthropology, science and technology studies, and medical ethics. In my work, I use ethnographic research methods to explore cultures of contemporary biomedicine in the United States—with a focus on reproductive medicine.
My first book project, entitled “How to Create Life: IVF Embryos the Scientists Who Make Them,” follows embryologists who grow and manage human embryos in IVF labs—within a national landscape in which gestating and IVF embryos are increasingly legislated as unborn children.
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How to Achieve Life
Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, lawmakers around 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 discard them in biohazard bins.
IVF embryos hold tremendous value for the patients who hope to one day parent them, and for the clinicians who help create them. As my research reveals, embryos can hold a diverse constellation of seemingly contradictory meanings. These meanings emerge in the IVF lab, where lab technicians cultivate them daily. Increasingly, their complex social meanings come into conflict with today’s legal and political landscape of reproductive medicine.
Alongside this project, I have published articles in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Fertility & Sterility, Somatosphere, and more on how IVF practices shape the way we think about embryos beyond the clinic.
Chromosomal Politics
My postdoctoral research examines the social, political, and ethical implications of routine and emerging modes of reproductive genetic testing.
My new study asks: How is the ability to sequence the fetal genome changing understandings of pregnancy, disability, illness, and risk?
To explore that question, I am currently conducting a study with prenatal genetic counselors across the country on the emerging clinical use of fetal whole genome sequencing. Fetal whole genome is the most comprehensive prenatal genetic test to date. While clinicians see many benefits, its use also raises critical ethical questions.
More on chromosomal politics: In an article now in revision, I examine how findings of preimplantation genetic tests mediate IVF patients’ relationships with their lab-grown embryos. I argue that “abnormal” test results can shape how patients envision their reproductive futures.
