142 R.P. Fitzgerald and M. Legge
all the allowable services^1 for their clients. This was despite the occa-
sional ‘four milliseconds of gut reaction then a couple more minutes to
think through the ethics of it, and then you’re thinking my God it’s hor-
rible and then, God but I might as well do it!’ as one scientist described
his working life. The trigger for those ‘four milliseconds’ differed for eve-
ryone, and learning to be non-judgemental was a key quality that most
workers considered essential in order to perform their duty to serve the
public. Being party as a scientist to what might be, in personal terms, an
ethically troubling although completely legal situation was thus an occa-
sional unintended outcome of their clients’ reproductive freedom. The
resulting everyday ethics that scientists elaborated arose through their
modelling of both their personal and professional persona to follow the
highest levels of secular service ideals.
Methods
This chapter is written from within the disciplinary style of social
anthropology, reflecting the narrative conventions of that field. It draws
on an ethnographic laboratory study conducted in two New Zealand
IVF clinics during 2005. The researchers were allowed supervised access
to the laboratories over a 6-week period, during which they were able to
familiarise themselves with laboratory routines and were given oppor-
tunities to observe the scientists’ daily work practices. This was far from
the classical style of ethnography undertaken in the early twentieth
century, in which the ethnographer stayed for the traditional (north-
ern hemisphere concept) of four seasons deemed necessary to learn the
‘native’ ways. Texts produced at that time frequently created an artifi-
cially holistic and timeless account of life of the ‘other’. Instead, this
work used a contemporary urban ethnographic technique to answer a
research question.
‘Fieldwork’ was undertaken within the extraordinarily confined space
of the wet and dry labs of the IVF facilities—a longish room in each
case of around 40 m^2. The anthropologist’s role in such a contemporary
setting was, as Wolcott ( 2008 : 46–68) terms it, to ‘experience’, ‘enquire’
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