Workshop
Gender, justice and the political economyof the cross-border fertility industry
April 7-8, 2016
University of Vienna
Abstracts
Institute of Literature,
Culture and Media, University of Southern Denmark / Global fluids: The cultural economy in eggs and urine
The body has become a goldmine of usable parts. In the United States, a woman may earn $20,000-35,000 as a surrogate; a sperm provider will receive in the range of $35-200 for his gametes, while egg donation ranges between $5,000-10,000. What may be considered bodily waste, excesses, usable parts, vacant bodies, or simply extractable material has contributed to an emerging relationship between the reproductive body, science and commerce. This presentation is about the ways that pregnant women’s urine and women’s eggs have become exchangeable. In the case of women’s eggs, they move from being constructed as excess and wasteful material to becoming understood not only as gifts but also, as evident in the Spanish case and in the case of Danish women going to Spain for egg donation, as outgoing and loving potential. When eggs enter the fertility industry, they acquire a biography of their own frequently drawing upon conventional (and national) stereotypes, fantasies, and imaginations.
Christina Weis
De Montfort University, United Kingdom / Trajectories of labor and delivery: Surrogacy workers in Russia
In Russia, commercial gestational surrogacy is legal. The two centres for the Russian market in surrogacy are in Moscow and St Petersburg. Here, fertility clinics and commercial agencies accumulate, and consequently client parents and surrogacy workers travel to these reproductive hubs.
In this presentation, which is based on 10 months of ethnographic research in St Petersburg (08/2014-05/2015), I provide insight into the social organization of surrogacy in St Petersburg, and how the city’s reproductive market rests on surrogacy workers ‘on the move’. I show how commercial agencies strategically mobilize and immobilize their migrant surrogacy workers at different stages of the programme: during the preparation period and the embryo taransfer, during the pregnancy, and after the delivery of the baby. Next, I contrast the experience of migrant surrogacy workers with the lived experience of (longdistance) commuting surrogacy workers—a form of movement more common in direct arrangements between client parents and surrogacy workers.
Veronika Siegl
Institute of Social Anthropology
University of Bern / Doing it business-style: Social understandings of surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine
Surrogacy arrangements in Russia are conceived as an economic collaboration that women enter as „entrepreneurs“ for financial reasons. However, this collaboration mostly remains a secret one – as the topic of surrogacy touches upon morally disputed issues and provokes highly emotional debates. While intended parents are confronted with the stigmatisation of their infertility and their children, surrogates are accused of selling their children. Based my ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow, I want to explore how gestational carriers react to and deal with the critical attitudes towards their work. How do they become and how are they made into „ethical subjects“ when engaged in an activity perceived as greatly unethical? In what ways do their individual moralities intersect with and are influenced by those of clinics and agencies? And since the field of morality is closely linked to the sphere of emotions and affect: What kinds of emotional labour do surrogates fulfil and are expected to fulfil, in order to find the right balance between care and distance?
Christa Wichterich
Women in Development Europe, WIDE+ / IPW Talk:
Controversial surrogacy in India - in whose interest?At whose expenses?
India has become a hub in the transnational reconfiguration of reproduction. The Indian surrogate mother acts at the intersection of the medical-industrial complex, bio politics, and the hegemonic reproductive regime in Indian society. Key markers of these three power regimes are the categories of gender, class and/or caste, race and North/South. The biocapitalist economy expands market principles into areas that have been outside of the market before, actually biological reproduction and life production. Poor, subaltern and Muslim women in India serve the reproduction of mostly white, middle class couples from the Global North and their “imperialist” way of living. This leads to growing inequalities among women, and the stratification of reproduction. The article attempts to acknowledge the surrogate mother’s agency and subjectivities by analysing it as waged labour in a highly alienated, exploitative and precarious production process. Being highly contested, the hindu-nationalist government in India plans to restrict it to Indian citizens as means to overcome infertility.
Daniela Schuh, Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna / International surrogacy and the work of legal epistemologies in France and Germany
When French or German citizens conceive through international surrogacy, they might face insurmountable difficulties in being accepted as legal parents under the law of their home countries. Since both countries refer to descent when granting citizenship (albeit to various degrees), uncertainty about the children’s legal parents may further trigger difficulties in defining their nationality.
The paper scrutinizes selected court proceedings in which German and French citizens demand their states to accept the linage between them and their surrogate-born children and further grant citizenship to the new-borns. This research is based on my interest in the various ways in which collective subjectivities and citizenships are both shaped and conscripted by technologies that concern life itself. Aiming to decipher the special importance of both, new reproductive technologies and legal cultures in this process, I will discuss how international surrogacy relates to assumptions about parenthood and nationality as present in French and German law.
Eva Maria Knoll, Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences / Reproductive tourism in Europe and medical travel in Asia - A reconsideration
The cross-border fertility industry ranks as a niche market in both the fertility and the tourism industries. What can we learn from a society where medical travel is more the norm than exception? This paper invites conference participants on a contrasting excursion to the Indian Ocean.
The Maldives is a small island developing state (SIDS) but with the regionally comparatively affluent standing as the only upper-middle-income economy in South Asia. Within this wider framework, medical travel has become a self-evident, intrinsic part of the Maldivian medical landscape. The country’s first general health insurance scheme covers transnational patient referrals under certain conditions. At the same time the Maldivian population has to face the world’s highest prevalence of beta-thalassaemia, a genetic disorder affecting the body’s ability to create red blood cells.The paper discusses Maldivian medical travel as a creative response to health inequity as the consequence of archipelagic limitations and spatiotemporal remoteness.
Mariella Hager and Erich Griessle
Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, Austria / Changing direction: The struggle about regulating ART in Austria
Austria from 1992 until 2015 had a very restrictive Reproductive Medicine Law that prohibited a number of ART treatments such as, e.g., egg donation, PGD, heterologous sperm donation for IVF/ICSI as well as general access to ART for same sex couples. As a consequence of this rather prohibitive law, Austrian physicians active in the area of ART cooperated with or had daughter institutes in countries with less restricting legal regulations such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which are only a few hours’ drive away. A more liberal reform of the Reproductive Medicine Law was for a long time blocked by the fierce and seemingly unresolvable struggle between permissive social democrats and restrictive conservatives, a division which also mirrored in the respective recommendations of the Austrian Bioethics Commission to the Federal Chancellor. Only in 2015 the gridlock, which lasted over decades, was dissolved in favor of a more liberal Reproductive Medicine Law that permits egg donation, PGD in some cases and heterologous sperm donation also for IVF/ICSI and lesbian couples. ART treatments for single women and surrogate motherhood are still prohibited. The new Reproductive Medicine Law is heavily criticized by the Catholic Church, by some conservatives as well as by disability associations. The paper will present the political positions taken before and after the reform and will outline the effects of the former restrictive law, which resulted in open medical tourism. The paper is based on an extensive empirical study on the use of ART in Austria “Genetic Testing and Changing Images of Human Life” funded by the Austrian Genome Research Program GEN-AU)
Organized with the kind support of the “Forschungsverbund Gender und Handlungsmacht” (Gender and Agency), the Research Area “Knowledge societies in turbulent times: science, democracy and public space“, the „Department of Science and Technology Studies“, and the „Department of Political Science“.