REPRODUCTIVE GEOPOLITICS
Project Description
Governing and Contesting In/Fertility within the Swiss Asylum Context
Reproductive Justice: A Feminist Concept in Motion
Gendering and Racializing In/fertility among Marginalized Women in Mexico
The Reproductive Geopolitics of Spain’s Strawberry Industry
The Invisible – Modern Slavery in Europe
Intimate Strangers: Commercial Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the Making of Truth
Short Film Program: Reproductive Justice
Making Babies. Egg Donation and the Politics of Reproduction.
Kassensturz - Strawberries from Spain - to buy or not?
Erdbeeren isst sie jetzt nicht
Exhibition: Making Babies in Bern
Toxic Textures
Elusive Exposures Event Series
Exhibition: Making Babies in Berlin
"Making Babies?" Panel Discussion Video
In Ukraine and Russia, surrogacy is seen as work
Lidl setzt sich stärker für Pflückerinnen ein als Coop und Migros
Sie pflücken unsere Erdbeeren unter prekären Bedingungen
WOZ – Solidarität im Zeichen der Erdbeere
Erkenntnis als kollektiver Prozess
Bi aller Liebi... So kann und will ich nicht schwanger werden
Eierstock mit Beinen?
Als Julie ging, ihre Eizellen einzufrieren
Podcast: La selección genética en la clínica de fertilidad: tendencias presentes y futuras.
Deutschlandfunk – Erst die Technologie, dann die Ethik?
Bayern 2 debattiert: Eizellenspende - Was würde eine Legalisierung bedeuten?
Blick – Nachfrage nach Leihmüttern steigt
Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik – Das Geschäft mit dem Kinderwunsch
RaBe – Ausstellung «Babys machen»
WOZ – Der Begriff «Spende» führt in die Irre
L’autoconservation des ovocytes, une réponse médicale à un problème social ?
SRF – Für das Wunschkind nach Spanien
SRF – Leihmutterschaft: pro und contra
Frankfurter Rundschau – Gibt es ein Recht auf ein Kind?
Governing in/fertile bodies in Mexico’s past and present
Der Bund – eine Legalisierung stoppt den Reproduktionstourismus nicht
ZDF – Müssen wir die Eizellenspende legalisieren?
RBB – Eizellenspende: Zwischen Verbot und realer Anwendung
Zeit online – "Sie wollen die Eizellspende legalisieren, ohne die Details zu klären"
Tagesanzeiger – Eine Legalisierung stoppt den Reproduktionstourismus nicht
SRF – Geschichten hinter den Spenderinnen
Welt – Was mit den Babys von Leihmüttern im Krieg passiert
20minuten – Schweizer Eltern bangen um Leihmutter-Babys aus der Ukraine
DW Deutsch – Ukrainische Leihmütter im Krieg
Selbstbestimmte Familienplanung: Haben Geflüchtete Zugang zu Beratung?
Reproduktive Gerechtigkeit im Fluchtkontext – Neue Perspektiven
Intimate liminality in Spain's berry industry
Leihmutterschaft in Zeiten des Krieges
Reproduktive Gesundheit – die Perspektive geflüchteter Frauen in der Schweiz
Peripartale Gesundheit asylsuchender Frauen in der Schweiz: who cares?
Erschwerter Zugang zu Verhütung in den Asylzentren: Perspektiven von geflüchteten Frauen in der Schweiz
Governing in/fertile bodies in Mexico’s past and present
Globale Intimität multisensorisch erforschen und ausstellen
Egg freezing, genetic relatedness, and motherhood:A binational empirical bioethical investigation of women's views
Imagining Motherhood and Becoming a Mother After Egg Freezing. An Anthropological Study in the French Context
Exploring Medical Egg Freezing as a Disease Management Strategy
Exhibiting Toxicity: Sprayed Strawberries and Geographies of Hope
Book Review: Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold
Intimate Technologies: Towards a Feminist Perspective on Geographies of Technoscience
Selective Assisted Reproduction
Book Review: Freezing Fertility: Oocyte Cryopreservation and the Gender Politics of Aging.
Spain's Reproductive El Dorado. The Economization of Spanish "Egg Donation"
Feminist Geographies of Technosciences
Transnational Reproductive Mobility from Switzerland
The Promise of a Healthy Child. An Analysis of the Spanish Egg Donation Economy.
Intimate Lives in the Global Bioeconomy: Reproductive Biographies of Mexican Egg Donors
Reproductive Rights
Fertility Clinic
The Affective Economy of Transnational Surrogacy
The Baby Business Booms: Economic Geographies of Assisted Reproduction
Multiple Mobilities in Mexico’s Fertility Industry
From Biopolitics to Bioeconomies: The ART of (Re-) producing White Futures in Mexico's Surrogacy Market
The Promise of a Healthy Child. An Analysis of the Spanish Egg Donation Economy.
Laura Perler
Abstract
Spain is the European leader in reproductive medicine. A liberal legislation and a large number of private reproductive clinics attract a steadily growing number of international patients who travel to Spain to fulfill their dream of having a family. Two techniques are crucial for this transnational mobility: egg donation and reprogenetics. In my work, I study the interdependencies of these two techniques by analysing the use of the genetic carrier test in egg donation cycles. The interplay of those techniques is due to the main goal of reproductive medicine, which is to produce ‘healthy’ children.
I situate my work within a (transdisciplinary) feminist Science & Technology Studies (STS) debate that analyses new forms of appropriation of women’s bodies in a global bioeconomy. While research has already analysed egg donation in relation to classist and racist structures, little is known about the prob- lematics of genetic diagnostic techniques in the context of egg donation. My work starts addressing this gap. Following a praxeographic approach, I explore how the imaginary of a ‘healthy’ child manifest itself in the form of multiple practices in the clinic’s everyday life. I also discuss how this affects different actors differentely (egg donors, egg recipients, clinic staff, geneticists). Inspired by the approaches of a ‘sensory ethnography’, I aim to make this universe of Spanish reproductive medicine not only cognitively comprehensible but also sensually tangible through written, visual and auditive elements, which are accessible through hyperlinks.
The ‘healthy’ child, this is my main thesis, is an important social imaginary in the contemporary Spanish reproductive clinic. The social imaginary is the conceptual prism through which I make visible the multiple entanglements of power relations, collective imaginaries of the future and contemporary practices in the clinic. In doing so, I show that the ‘healthy’ child is based on ideal, material and bodily relations of inequality, through which the egg donor is (re)produced as a subaltern subject. The collective visions of the future in the clinic point to the fact that the use of (genetic) selection techniques is normalised via a narrative of progress. Finally, the analysis of the use of the genetic carrier test shows how the imaginary materialises in practices that (re)produce the underlying power relations of a transnational bioeconomy. This reification of an abstract imaginary in social practices and medical techniques is not a linear process, but is characterised by multiple contradictions and ambivalences. In my work, I show that it is precisely the fragility and volatility of knowledge structures in relation to the genetic carrier test that result in a stable basis for the imaginary of the ‘healthy’ child. The work thus shows that assisted reproduction is already today a genuinely selective reproduction. The ‘healthy’ child is not only a dream, but (re)produces socio-economic as well as ideational-normative structures of inequality.