This thesis explores the processual nature of agency and constraints in the experience of medicalized conception in a not yet explored locale: Bogota, Colombia. In ten months of ethnographic research at two fertility centers in Bogota, and interview data from over 100 in-depth interviews with women and men undergoing ARTs and clinic staff, a complex ART industry driven by both doctors (qua entrepreneurs) and the couples seeking medicalized conception was explored. This thesis identifies how relationships in the clinic combined with understandings of “the fragmented body” (as a medicalized object under scrutiny) and “the self” (as a conscious agent), to produce intricate dynamics of agency and constraints that co-evolved in a processual manner. Tracing the experiences of women in infertility treatment chronologically, the thesis explores how knowledge was established and renegotiated through productive power fields that relationally incorporated embodied, personal knowledge and authoritative medical expertise. Women adapted to constraints in both active and passive ways to create and assert their ever-transforming agentive capacities. In these processes, they were constantly reflecting on, and renegotiating their position in the treatment process, as well as in their social lives more broadly. Drawing on, and seeking to contribute to, literature on agency in ARTs from across the world, particularly literature that considers agency as a process co-established by the constraints it confronts, this thesis makes two key arguments: First, that agency in Colombian ART clinics is defined as reflection and renegotiation, rather than as something which occurs at a singular moment of reflection and renegotiation. Second, that this negotiated process is constrained, but not contained. In other words, agency is a process that looks both backwards and forwards. Women and couples incorporated different personal histories and embodied knowledge into negotiating the treatment process and constraints they encountered, and adapted their experiences of ART treatments to other aspects of their lives, negotiating constraints that reach beyond the clinical setting.

This study was conducted using a quantitative design and statistical analysis to determine the extent to which social support will influence an individual's decision to seek treatment for a medical illness. Main findings include significant correlations between measures of perceived and tangible social support and treatment compliance.