Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim

is a sociologist living in Munich. She has held professorships in Germany, the United Kingdom and Norway and is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Cosmopolitan Studies, University of Munich. She rose to international fame with her studies on new forms of family life, including “The normal chaos of life”, (1990, with Ulrich Beck); “Reinventing the family – in search of new lifestyles” (2002), and “Individualization – institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences” (2002, with Ulrich Beck).

Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim - Reproductive medicine and its progeny

Erfolge - Risiken - Nebenwirkungen

Throughout the world, hi-tech reproduction medicine is paving the way for whole new forms of intervention into human life. Between supply and demand, a global market for dream-child medicine has grown up, its services ranging from in-vitro fertilisation to selecting the child’s sex, from illustrated catalogues of semen and egg-cell donors to the provision of surrogate mothers. Looking at this vast array, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim asks some urgent, critical questions: are the wishes of parents choosing their ideal child compatible with that child’s needs? Should everything technically possible actually be done? And if not, what are the limits and who should define them?