Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

Abstract

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain.

Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain

“…We suggest that this ontological, processual, understanding of bioavailability offers a greater opportunity for analysis of the unequal, racialising and colonising dimensions of global fertility chains (Vertommen et al, 2022b). Migrant women become bioavailable as egg providers through an interaction of larger global forces of geographic unevenness, economic processes such as state financial crises and job precarity, racialised commodification of ‘whiteness’ and ‘post-colonial whiteness’ (Lopez 2012), as well as through their being gendered as women and therefore suitable for care and domestic labour, or as migrants perceived as suited to other low waged labour, and through everyday practices such as the ‘emotion work’ of making one’s bodies, time and presence available.…”

The Bioeconomy in economic literature: looking back, looking ahead

“…Recent political economy contributions also touch the more theoretical and global vision of the Bioeconomy. For example, Vertommen, Pavone and Nahman (2021) propose the concept of "global fertility chains", which "articulates the reproductive Bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed".…”

Emerging “repronubs” and “repropreneurs”: Transnational surrogacy in Ghana, Kazakhstan, and Laos

“…The emergence of Mexico and Thailand as major reprohubs for the trade in surrogacy also attracted considerable anthropological attention (Hovav, 2019; Schurr, 2018; Whittaker 2019). Furthermore, a handful of empirical studies have focused on less-known surrogacy locations, such as Russia (Dushina et al, 2016; Siegl, 2018a, 2018c; Smietana et al, 2021; Weis, 2019, 2021) Georgia (Vertommen et al, 2022; Vertommen and Reyns, 2019), Ukraine (Siegl, 2018b), and Canada (Fisher and Hoskins, 2013). Other studies have documented Australian intended parents’ experiences of surrogacy in India (Stockey-Bridge, 2018) and the complex social and legal barriers and complications involved in such movements (Hammarberg et al, 2015; Riggs and Due, 2017; Dempsey, 2013; Millbank, 2014).…”