Wendy Chavkin, "Globalized Motherhood: Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Context"
(page 2 of 4)

Okay, so now I'm going to get over to my "Globalized Motherhood" notion. I hope to have been persuasive that this is a worldwide phenomenon. And what you see is that, as this has happened, we see a dramatic increase in the use of reproductive technologies. For example, consider the number of procedures being done. Because fertility treatment involves a sequence of steps rather than the discrete procedures, this is counted by "ART cycles," which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control defines as a period of approximately two weeks that starts "when a woman begins taking drugs to stimulate egg production or starts ovarian monitoring with the intent of having embryos transferred."[6] The number of ART cycles per year more than doubled in the decade between 1995 and 2004.[7] Again, it's not just the U.S. The numbers are uneven, but you see the same general pattern for many of the other parts of the world I talked about.

As other speakers have mentioned, we have seen a dramatic increase in recent years in ova donation.[8] And here, you see a real spottiness—it's not increasing everywhere, but in specific places, among specific women. I think for the rest of the day's discussion, when people really try to talk in a more fine-tuned way about issues of exploitation, and issues of which women are getting which body bits from which other women, it's a complicated story. Those of you who are Barnard and Columbia students of privilege know that you too are being targeted, and being asked to be ova donors. That group in Spain, that high-level group, those are college students.

At the same time, we have also seen a dramatic increase in the transport of babies around the world,[9] known as intra-country adoption. There has been a slight falling off in the last couple of years, and that has been due partly to a variety of scandals, a variety of concerns, and somewhat, to China becoming both concerned about some internal pushback and also concerned about the fact that single mothers were adopting Chinese girls, and they made that more difficult.

Nonetheless, in a kind of time parallel, we've started seeing dramatic increase in people from one part of the world getting hold of babies from other parts of the world. In the United States, one way we can measure this is in the number of immigrant visas given to infants,[10] and this has also dramatically increased during the same time period. If we don't just think about the movement of babies generally, or look at specific families, but look at a national level at the top "Sending Countries" versus "Receiving Countries," you will see that the patterns are not simple. And the patterns don't stay exactly steady over different five-year periods, so you see this is in real flux. For example, the U.S. is the top receiver; that's consistent. But otherwise it is complex. You have countries with very low fertility rates, like China and Korea and Eastern European countries, sending babies to countries whose fertility rates are perhaps even a little bit higher than theirs, like the U.S. and western European countries.

The adoption scholars, and I am not one, say that the sort of ground settings for high levels of sending were war, poverty, and gender discrimination, which include stigma on unmarried motherhood. I think that too has gotten more complicated in recent years.

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