In Print: Conceiving Christian America
Publication Title
Author
Publisher
NYU Press
Publication Date
September 2023
About the Book (from the publisher)
In 1997, a group of white pro-life evangelical Christians in the United States created the nation’s first embryo adoption program to “save” the thousands of frozen human embryos remaining from assisted reproduction procedures, which they contend are unborn children. While a small part of US fertility services, embryo adoption has played an outsized role in conservative politics, from high-profile battles over public investment in human embryonic stem cell research to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Based on six years of ethnographic research with embryo adoption staff and participants, Risa Cromer uncovers how embryo adoption advances ambitious political goals for expanding the influence of conservative Christian values and power.
Conceiving Christian America is the first book on embryo adoption tracing how this powerful social movement draws on white saviorist tropes in their aims to reconceive personhood, with drastic consequences for reproductive rights and justice. Documenting the practices, narratives, and beliefs that move embryos from freezers to uteruses, this book wields anthropological wariness as a tool for confronting the multiple tactics of the Christian Right. Timely and provocative, Conceiving Christian America presents a bold and nuanced examination of a family-making process focused on conceiving a Christian nation.
About the Author
Dr. Risa Cromer received her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2016. From 2016-2019, she collaborated on interdisciplinary teams as a postdoctoral fellow in the Thinking Matters program and Center for Biomedical Ethics at Stanford University. In 2018, she was a visiting scholar in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at Cambridge University. Risa completed a Bachelors in Gender Studies from Willamette University and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center. She joined Purdue University faculty in Fall 2019.
Risa is an anthropologist of biomedicine, science, and technology who investigates social justice issues within bioethical controversies concerning reproduction, race, and disability. She is currently working on an ethnographic book that examines the political movements and stakes concerning frozen human embryos left over from in vitro fertilization in the United States. Intersectional analyses of gender, race, disability, sexuality, and religion are important to how she thinks, mentors, and teaches.
In her applied work, she has contributed to team research projects on mental health services for veterans and stays active within grassroots efforts around reproductive justice.
Risa’s research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Brocher Foundation, Stanford University, and the City University of New York. More information about her past and ongoing projects can be found at www.risacromer.net.