Visa Stamps for Injections: Traveling Biolabor and South African Egg Provision

Abstract

In this article, I discuss cross-border egg provision by young South African women as a form of traveling biolabor that is critically about embodiment, and aspirations for mobility and cosmopolitanism. The frame of biolabor challenges the frames of altruism/commodification, and choice/coercion, and instead highlights the desires of egg providers, fundamental to the creation and maintenance of the global fertility market. When biolabor crosses borders as traveling biolabor, the analysis can focus on the specificities of inequalities embedded within such reproductive mobility. Traveling or mobility is often a privileged decision and connotes freedom and cultural capital. Yet, when applied to young white egg providers from South Africa, this traveling biolabor relies on a particular kind of biopolitics wherein the reproductive potential of ova/egg is fundamental in facilitating women’s cross-border mobility. I divide the findings sections into three key themes—“cosmopolitan competency,” “alternatives to maternity,” and “productive pain”—to argue that, on the one hand, from recruitment of traveling egg providers to their (self) management, this biolabor is built on the young women’s aspirations for cosmopolitanism. Traveling biolabor becomes a way to escape the normative expectations of their (primarily rural, conservative) families and the (Afrikaner) national project of the volksmoeder (mother of the nation). On the other hand, the pursuit of these aspirations is critically contingent on management successfully reframing the embodied pain of egg provision as well as the biolaborer’s own maternity. Laborers’ desires and management disciplining tactics converge to sustain the global fertility market.

Reproductive travel to, from and within sub-Saharan Africa: A scoping review

“…Hörbst also pointed to a highly international ART clientele in Uganda, consisting of people from neighbouring countries, such as Rwanda, Congo, Tanzania and Sudan, as well as expatriates from India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Europe and the USA ( Hörbst and Gerrits, 2016a , Hörbst and Gerrits, 2016b ). Reproductive travellers have been studied in their country of origin ( Bochow, 2015 , Hörbst, 2015 , Hörbst and Gerrits, 2016a , Hörbst and Gerrits, 2016b ); at the CBRC destination ( Duchesne, 2016a , Duchesne, 2016b , Epelboin, 2016 , Gerrits, 2018 , Inhorn, 2015 , Hörbst and Gerrits, 2016a , Machin et al, 2018 ); and in both places by following reproductive travellers from their place of origin to the CBRC destination ( Faria, 2016 , Faria, 2018b , Pande, 2020 , Pande, 2021 ). People from SSA also ‘return home’ for treatments, as illustrated in research on diasporic Malians ( Hörbst, 2015 ), Ghanaian expatriates ( Gerrits, 2016 ), and South Africans living in Australia ( Rodino et al, 2014 ).…”

“… Pande and Moll (2018) described travelling South African ova donors; media and medical professionals characterized them as either ‘naïve’ or ‘greedy’ ‘girls’, but the travelling donors presented themselves, in contrast, as responsible altruists, combining economic compensation and the desire to help others. At the same time, regular travel overseas to provide ova, including to clinics in India and Cambodia, offers women from small conservative South African communities the chance to travel and participate in a cosmopolitan lifestyle ( Pande, 2020 ). In her work in South Africa, Namberger (2019) argued that the labour involved for such travelling donors obscured the promised adventure associated with travelling and exploring foreign countries.…”

“…The research we reviewed demonstrated interesting spectrums in terms of treatment stays, from long-stay diasporas for Angolans in Brazil ( Machin et al, 2018 ), Central Africans in France ( Bonnet and Duchesne, 2014 ) or long periods of medical surveillance in Ghana ( Gerrits, 2018 ), to several weeks in South Africa or repeated short border crossings between neighbouring countries ( Faria, 2016 ), through to some travellers from the global North combining their treatment with holidays ( Culley et al, 2011 , Moll, 2020 , Namberger, 2016 ) to egg providers taking quick trips to India ( Pande and Moll, 2018 ) or Cambodia ( Pande, 2020 , Pande, 2021 ).…”

“…This term also carries connotations of their roles within an extractive industry that draws upon bodily reproductive potentials and, in this way, is riven with questions of reproductive justice. A focus upon the experiences of these workers, and the experiences of reproductive assistors, such as the travelling ova donors who see their travel as one of the rewards of donation as described by Pande, 2020 , Pande, 2021 , is needed to capture the changing ‘hybrid’ forms of the reproductive industry and reproductive travel.…”

“…South Africa has a long-standing reputation for high-quality private medical care, including ART, and has a developed medical travel trade, especially within southern Africa ( Crush and Chikanda, 2015 ). For fertility care, South Africa is known internationally as a hub for assisted reproduction, particularly among intending parents who need donor oocytes ( Moll, 2019 , Namberger, 2016 , Pande, 2020 ).…”