The baby business booms: Economic geographies of assisted reproduction

Abstract

This paper explores how reproductive life has changed through the development, transnational spread, and commercialization of assisted reproductive technologies (in vitro fertilization, gamete donation, and surrogacy). (Economic) geography has been slow to take up the vibrant debates in anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and other neighboring disciplines on assisted reproductive technologies and their effects on society, kinship, and reproduction. In this paper, I argue that an analysis of the fast-growing transnational market of assisted reproduction has much to gain from economic geographies with their interest in the making of markets across borders and feminist economic geographers' engagement with how new forms of gendered and racialized divisions of labor intersect with particular economic, cultural, political, and social contexts. I discuss literature on assisted reproductive technologies and their transnational economies against the background of these two issues—the transnational making of fertility markets and the global division of reproductive labor along axes of gender, race, class, and nationality. The conclusion points out the need for articulating geographies of assisted reproduction that integrate a geographic perspective into the study of assisted reproductive technologies and reproductive economic geographies that push the boundaries of economic geography towards the economies of (assisted) reproduction.