Therapeutic navigations: National and transnational quests for fertility among Mozambican women and men

This thesis explores Mozambican women and couple’s processes of coping with infertility and their national and transnational therapeutic itineraries in the quest for a child. Based on the idea of therapeutic navigation, this work accounts for the manifold social and individual aspects and strategies involved in processes of infertility treatment seeking and uptake departing from Maputo's fluid urban context.
Through chapters devoted to various socio-cultural aspects of these therapeutic navigations and to the interaction between biomedicine and local ideas about reproduction, parenthood, family and healing, the study explores how people from different socio-economic backgrounds seek solutions to impaired reproduction.
Zooming in from a contextual approach towards specific case studies, this thesis provides an agency-focused analysis of the intersections between: local ideas about marriage and family; aspects of coping with, and seeking treatment for, infertility both in Mozambique and South Africa; lay people interaction with worlds of expertise such as biomedicine and biomedical technologies, namely assisted reproduction technologies, and local aspects of healthcare provision and access.
Besides accounting for inequalities in access to health care and different kinds of strategic maneuvering, it also demonstrates how people's agency in the quest for infertility care often represents small everyday life changes. In this sense, adding to Mozambican women's and couples’ national and transnational therapeutic pathways per se, this thesis explores the ways through which processes of therapeutic navigation may contribute to the motion of an already fluid and transforming social environment.