Global Fertility Chains: a new political economy of outsourced reproduction
Since the mid-2000s transnational surrogacy has transformed into a popular and lucrative niche in the global fertility market, mostly helping economically well-off, Western infertile/dysfertile couples in making their procreative dreams come true. As part of what has been termed the new sexual division of labour, more and more women from the Global South and North are commodifying their reproductive tissues, capacities and services by working as surrogates or egg donors. Surrogacy and egg donation arrangements have caused a lot of moral concern and upheaval among scholars and policy makers. Similar to “older” discussions on other feminised forms of “dirty labour” such as sex work, arguments are often strongly moralising. Market critics emphatically oppose the commodification of bodily tissues in favour of a gift economy based on altruistic donations and informed consent. Market proponents, in contrast, encourage the commercialisation of reproductive tissues and the remuneration of tissue providers in an attempt to overcome issues of scarcity. This project aims to transcend these moral dilemmas by foregrounding a feminist political economy analysis of one ‘actually existing’ fertility chain that is becoming increasingly popular, i.e. between Israel/Palestine and Georgia. By ethnographically following the reproductive trail of Israeli intended parents and their fertility brokers to Georgia, where available and affordable surrogates are recruited, the project empirically investigates the gendered and racialised regimes of labour, property and value creation in the surrogacy industry. By mapping the intricate ways in which reproductive tissues and labour move in and out of commodity state as they move through different regimes of governance in the fertility chain, it analyses the volatile boundaries between gift and commodity, value and waste, labour and donation, property and entitlement that structure the reproductive bio-economy.
Research objectives
1. Working towards strengthening the conceptual and theoretical framework on assisted reproduction, globalisation and bio-economies by highlighting the intersecting hierarchies of race, gender and class. My aim is to add a perspective from topical research on (settler)colonial studies and political economy to the well-established STS and feminist techno-science literature on assisted reproduction.
2. Analysing the political economy of global fertility chains by documenting the governance of highly gendered and racialised regimes of labour and property in the repro-flow between Palestine/Israel and Georgia.
3. Mapping the shifting commodity status and changing bio-value of reproductive tissues and workers throughout their trajectory in the global fertility chain, and probing dominant dichotomies between gift-commodity, labour-donation, waste-value, property-entitlement in the reproductive bio-economy.
4. Formulating policy recommendations on the governance of transnational surrogacy and oocyte vending and suggesting alternative, socially responsible ways of configuring the reproductive bio-economy that avoid exploitation, human degradation and trafficking as well as (Eurocentric) paternalism.
Since the mid-2000s transnational surrogacy has transformed into a popular and lucrative niche in the global fertility market, mostly helping economically well-off, Western infertile/dysfertile couples in making their procreative dreams come true. As part of what has been termed the new sexual division of labour, more and more women from the Global South and North are commodifying their reproductive tissues, capacities and services by working as surrogates or egg donors.
