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 and science and technology studies. 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 landscape in which gestating and IVF embryos are increasingly legislated as unborn children.

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Embryo Cultures

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

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.

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 and steward them. As my research reveals, a diverse constellation of meanings surround in vitro embryos—even within the same person. Sometimes, their 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.

Chromosomal Politics

My postdoctoral research examines the social, political, and ethical implications of routine and emerging modes of reproductive genetic testing.

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 use of prenatal whole genome sequencing clinically.

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 curtail embryos’ envisoned fuutres—what I theorize as a process of chromosomal foreclosure.

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About Me

About Me

Research Program

Research Program

Teaching

Teaching

Get in touch

Get in touch