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The present contribution is in the field of quantum modelling of macroscopic phenomena. The focus is on one enigmatic aspect of quantum physics, namely, the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox and entanglement. After a review of the state-of-the-art concerning macroscopic quantum effects and quantum interaction, this paper aims to propose a link between embryology and acupuncture in the framework of macroscopic intricate states induced by quantum mechanics.

The author uses the fractaquantum hypothesis which supposes that the quantum framework is applicable to all insecable elements in nature, whatever their size.

This contribution considers an open question related to a possible link between acupuncture and embryology: can a weak form of intrication be maintained during stem cell division to interpret the acupuncture meridians as an explicit manifestation of a macroscopic intricate system? The macroscopic structure suggested by quantum mechanics could be a beginning of explanation of acupuncture through the embryologic development.

A fundamental hypothesis is the fact that during cell division, cells keep some weak intrication.

This contribution suggests a structure of the acupuncture meridians. The links between the acupuncture points have to be searched in the embryologic development of the individual through a weak remaing intrication of some of his cells and not in present explicit relations.

A new link between occidental and oriental cultures is explored.

This contribution suggests conceptual links between acupuncture, embryology and macroscopic intricate states.

As Sir Anthony Alment has indicated: “Much of the public debate which followed publication of the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human fertilisation and embryology in July 1984 has followed predictable polarities” (Alment, 1985, p.300).

The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) defines the act of travelling abroad to undergo reproductive medical treatments, including assisted reproduction technology (ART) treatments as cross-border reproductive care. The experiences of patients seeking affordable reproductive care abroad have been widely studied in the last decades (Bergman, 2011a, 2011b; Blyth, 2010; Bracewell-Milnes et al., 2016; Culley et al., 2011; Guerzoni, 2017; Hudson, 2017, 2020; Hudson & Culley, 2011; Kroløkke, 2014a, 2014b; Rodino, Goedeke, & Nowoweiski, 2014; Salama et al., 2018; Shenfield et al., 2010; Van Hoof, Pennings, & De Sutter, 2016; Whittaker, Inhorn, & Shenfield, 2019; Zanini, 2011). However, French women and couples pursuing ART treatments abroad have received little scholarly attention until now. In this chapter, we aim to address this gap in the literature with the results from an ethnographic study conducted with French women and couples who seek ART treatments in Barcelona (Spain) using data from participant observation and in-depth interviews. We begin by discussing the European reproscape, introducing French and Spanish ART legislation, to explain why a large number of citizens are excluded from the French system of reproductive governance and why they choose Spain as their destination. Then, we will discuss the obstacles faced during the reproductive journey, and the impacts of this journey on the embodiment of the treatments are explored, in order to show how French women and couples handle the physical, emotional and cultural displacements that their reproductive project entails.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with a foundational gendered imaginary in Western medical and popular discourse regarding fetal sexual development. It is an imaginary that consists of dual narratives that bolster an oppositional complementary model of sex-gender. By these accounts male sexual development results from complex and multi-faceted processes generated by the Y chromosome while female sexual development is straightforward, articulated through a discourse of “default sex” (Jost, 1953). Such apparent truths fit seamlessly with the timeworn notion of maleness and masculinity as always already active, and femaleness and femininity always and inevitably passive. In other words, he does and she is.

Despite embryogenetic findings thoroughly debunking these ideas, contemporary medical and biological textbooks remain haunted by outdated androcentric models of sex development. This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.

This paper demonstrates how new ways of thinking can lead to a new understanding with regards to sex, gender, bodies, and experiences.

This paper attends to biomedical and everyday understandings of sex and gender to demonstrate how fresh lines of inquiry produce conditions that enable new ways of understanding bodies and embodied experiences.

One in six people globally are affected by infertility, and many turn to fertility treatment in a bid to have a child(ren). While many countries offer work-related legislative protections and provisions for those who are successful in conceiving a child, in the form of maternity and paternity-related supports and protection again discrimination – the same cannot be said for those struggling to conceive. There are similar inequalities when it comes to workplace policy and support. Drawing on data from our two-year research study on “complex fertility journeys” and employment, this chapter sets out the work-life challenges that arise when individuals find themselves navigating the considerable “reproductive work” of fertility treatment alongside the demands of paid employment, and how affected employees respond. It also touches on the challenges experienced by line managers tasked with offering support. The chapter concludes with implications for practice in terms of making organizations more “fertility friendly,” which should extend beyond support for attending fertility treatment appointments to include awareness raising, manager training, and support for the varied outcomes of treatment cycles, including involuntary childlessness.

This article addresses the difficult matter of interpreting the best interest principle, and offers advice for those who must make laws, and those who make decisions within the constraints of those laws. Our approach rests on an assumption that conclusions about best interest are best reached through a reasoned deliberative process. We suggest that legislators should not write substantive assumptions about what is best for every child into their laws; rather, they should indicate a non‐exhaustive list of key relevant considerations that decision‐makers can review and evaluate in each and every case. Further, the child's own perspective should be imperative in all deliberations about best interest, and a distinction must be made between objective fact and what is invoked as a substantive and contestable assumption. The article supplies a benchmark against which we may review and judge the actual efforts of legislators and decision‐makers to determine what is best for any child.

The purpose of this paper is to compare user involvement in the case of assisted reproductive technologies in England and Portugal through the concepts of voice, choice and co-production, assessing the implications for user empowerment.

This qualitative study draws primarily on policy review and uses exploratory semi-structured interviews with key informants as a way of illustrating points. Data on the following themes was compared: voice (users’ representativeness on licensing bodies and channels of communication between users and doctors); choice (funding and accessibility criteria; choice of fertility centres, doctors and level of care); and co-production (criteria through which users actively engage with health professionals in planning the treatment).

Inter- and intra-healthcare systems variations between the two countries on choice and co-production were identified. Differences between funding and accessibility, regions, public and private sectors and attitudes towards doctor-patient relationship (paternalistic/partnership) were the key issues. Although consumer choice and indicators of co-production are evident in treatment pathways in both countries, user empowerment is not. This is limited by inequalities in accessibility criteria, dependence on doctors’ individual perspectives and lack of genuine and formal hearing of citizens’ voice.

Enhancing users’ involvement claims for individual and organizational cultures reflecting user-centred values. Effective ways to incorporate users’ knowledge in shared decision making and co-design are needed to empower patients and to improve the delivery of care.

This essay brings structural intimacies – theorised as the meeting of social structural patterns with interpersonal lives – to the border to consider transnational LGBTQ kinships. Specifically, the paper considers ‘the border’ and its state-driven bio-regulations as a reproductive technology that produces LGBTQ, racial/ethnic and social class inequities through the consolidation of heteronormative, bio-genetic kinship institutions and ideations of family. Structural intimacies harnesses intimacy as both subject and as an analytic lens for queering reproductive sociology that insists on re-conceptualizing institutions central to our lives. Structural intimacies move our analytic gaze from how the border structures sexuality, and vice versa, to consider the border as at once a structural and an affective domain. Structural intimacies is a conceptual tool useful for cross-disciplinary inquiry into the social and structural contexts in which reproductive technologies render meaning, as well as produce families, and to illustrate the analytic necessity of storying both content and method as integral to queer/ing scholarship. Straddling the most proximal forms of daily care and labor patterning everyday intimacies with the policies and practices of the state, the concept of structural intimacies reveals moments of encounter between state institutions with the most intimate components of a person's life and identity, in this case amplified by the bio-politics of the border.