Controlling Creation: Islam and Medically Aided Conception in Indonesia
Taylor Purvis, BA, First Year Medical Student, Johns Hopkins University
In Indonesia (the country with the world’s largest Muslim population) infertility challenges the Qur’anic ideal of family formation. Ever since the first birth of a child from in vitro fertilization in 1988, Indonesian government officials, fertility clinic physicians, and national Islamic scholars have expressed concern over who can have access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and which procedures can be performed.
This paper examines how Islamic legal opinions, or fatwas, have dramatically influenced the experience of infertility in Indonesia. Despite Indonesia’s status as a nominally secular nation, the Indonesian Council of Ulama—the national coalition of all major Indonesian Muslim groups—has issued decrees that shape the laws and customs surrounding ART. In effect, this government-affiliated body has determined who has access to potentially life-changing procedures and whether controversial practices such as third-party gamete donation should be permitted.
I argue that Islamic religious norms promote a national ideal of a successful Indonesian family, one characterized by a married, heterosexual couple and a female partner devoted principally to the work of motherhood. The influence of Islamic values on ART clinic policy reveals that a new approach is necessary to reduce infertility in religious societies—one that proposes creative, if less efficacious, changes to accommodate religious mores. Drawing on interviews with Indonesian physicians, Indonesian government publications, and Islamic texts on bioethics, this paper demonstrates how religious conceptions of morally and socially acceptable intimacy police the interplay among sexuality, marriage, and parenthood in Indonesia.
In Indonesia (the country with the world’s largest Muslim population) infertility challenges the Qur’anic ideal of family formation. Ever since the first birth of a child from in vitro fertilization in 1988, Indonesian government officials, fertility clinic physicians, and national Islamic scholars have expressed concern over who can have access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and which procedures can be performed.
This paper examines how Islamic legal opinions, or fatwas, have dramatically influenced the experience of infertility in Indonesia. Despite Indonesia’s status as a nominally secular nation, the Indonesian Council of Ulama—the national coalition of all major Indonesian Muslim groups—has issued decrees that shape the laws and customs surrounding ART. In effect, this government-affiliated body has determined who has access to potentially life-changing procedures and whether controversial practices such as third-party gamete donation should be permitted.
I argue that Islamic religious norms promote a national ideal of a successful Indonesian family, one characterized by a married, heterosexual couple and a female partner devoted principally to the work of motherhood. The influence of Islamic values on ART clinic policy reveals that a new approach is necessary to reduce infertility in religious societies—one that proposes creative, if less efficacious, changes to accommodate religious mores. Drawing on interviews with Indonesian physicians, Indonesian government publications, and Islamic texts on bioethics, this paper demonstrates how religious conceptions of morally and socially acceptable intimacy police the interplay among sexuality, marriage, and parenthood in Indonesia.