I’m going to now just talk about the actual biology itself, and ways in which biology has to be rethought to understand how we can think about it as a kind of clinical reproductive labor. I’ll first talk about fertility outsourcing and the biology of assisted reproduction.
For the greater part of the 20th century, assisted reproduction technologies and IVF have been devoted precisely to the mass reproduction of animal life for industrial agriculture. That is where IVF technologies emerged. They emerged from the management of large industrial animal herds. IVF technology has also inherited concerns with standardization, rationalization, and a kind of factory-production model of scientific management. If we think about IVF as a process that intervenes at different points in the trajectory of in vivo reproduction, it breaks it down into its components, it scales some of the components up, or scales them down, and it renders them ex vivo. Therefore, instead of reproduction being something that takes place inside the body through the self-regulating biology that goes to work to make the baby, you actually identify the different points in the reproductive process as if you’re breaking it down into a production line, if you like. You disaggregate insemination from conception. You can disaggregate the egg from the body and with gestational surrogacy, you can disaggregate the uterus from the actual contracting parent. So we see this way in which the process of reproduction gets redistributed in a much more, in a sense, industrial production line.
By doing this, it gets around certain kinds of clinical bottlenecks in the process. So typically, people who go to have fertility treatments have some kind of problem with one of these processes, and by rendering it ex vivo, you can then address the particular problems. There might be a problem with sperm, there might be a problem with eggs, there might be a problem with gestation itself, and if you can just isolate and externalize these different aspects, then you can get around the bottleneck and you can get your baby in the end. Well, you may not, of course—the success rates are not that high. It is a kind of industrialization of the process of reproduction, and it is precisely this industrialization which lends it to the new kinds of spatial ordering, so you can use Indian populations, you can use East European populations as reproductive sites, precisely because of this disaggregation.
It seems to me that it is very, very similar to the off-shoring and subcontracting and manufacture which happened in the 1990s, where in response to the falling rates of profit for industrial manufacture in the United States and Western Europe, that manufacturing goes off shore. It goes to southern China, in particular. But of course, the head office stays in Europe or the United States and you subcontract your production out to this other site. This is really effectively what is happening with this off-shoring and fertility outsourcing. You identify low-cost populations, if you can facilitate different stages of your reproductive process, more cheaply than you could if you were to stay in the relative wealth of the global North.
The process is nevertheless different from the stem cell process because it’s concerned with preserving the developmental pathways that will eventually produce a child, even if these pathways have to travel through several different bodies. You keep the pathways more or less the same, you just divert them outside the body, and eventually you will send them back. Stem cell research is quite different from this, because it is precisely concerned with disrupting the teleology of the production of an organism, a child. It’s precisely about experimenting with cellular potential and diverting cellular potential in all kinds of novel ways that have nothing to do with the reproduction of an organism. You define the potential of the cell in a radically-different way from how it’s defined in reproductive medicine.
So in the case of embryonic stem cells, the pluripotency of the embryo is diverted away from the production of the blastocyst and eventually, the fetus, and towards the production of a cell line. The cell line immortalizes the tissue and facilitates the self-perpetuating potential in vitro. They are called immortalized cell lines because theoretically, the cell line will live indefinitely and just reproduce the same kind of tissues over and over and over again in the laboratory. Theoretically then, the embryonic stem cell line can produce any of the specialized, fully-differentiated cells that constitute a developing organism, while continuing to divide and produce more of themselves in an uncommitted ex-organism state.
This is a technology concerned with the potential of the cell. It’s concerned with the future possibilities of differentiation that are always surplus to the finite possibilities of differentiation within the organism itself. If our bodies start to proliferate cells in an immortalized fashion, we call it cancer, and of course, it’s an extremely serious clinical condition. But precisely the same kind of open-ended proliferation, in vitro, is an extremely bio-valuable capacity and it is highly sought-after. The biology of the cell is being reorganized around the promissory value form, which animates the stock market-driven, post-Fordist mode of accumulation—or at least it did until about a year ago.
So we have been very much acculturated to an economy which works on the promise of value, which is what stock market value is. It is always about value that takes place in the future. Suddenly, though, with the global financial crisis, the future seems to have stopped and it is intriguing to think about how the promissory value of biomedicine might relate to this failure of promissory value in the broader economy.
I will just make a couple of concluding comments. As I said, a key feature of life sciences research and bioeconomic development since the 1970s is about the recalibration of reproductive processes of biology, and more and more of these processes have been turned into a new material base for production. The whole regenerative medicine paradigm is precisely about securing the reproductive process of biology and transforming it into a new material base for the production of clinically-useful material. I think it would be fair to say that if we combine that development with the development I was talking about before—the ways in which the reproductive sphere of Fordism has been put on the market—reproduction in general has been put to work, so the whole reproduction is now involved in a kind of labor.
Both the domestic life of the Fordist economy and the biological reproduction of the body have been put on the post-Fordist labor market, if you like, and really, what we are trying to do in the book is to think about the implications of that development for women and for the populations in developing and transitional economies who are most caught up in the process.
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Catherine Waldby – Podcast Description
Catherine Waldby is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at The University of Sydney, Australia. In this lecture, delivered on November 6, 2009 at Barnard College, Professor Waldby explores the emerging tensions between women’s voluntary (public good) donation of reproductive tissues for stem cell research and the increasing resort to transactional forms of tissue procurement, for example egg sharing and egg vending. She locates this tension in both a feminist biopolitical analysis and in the broader dynamics of the global bioeconomy.
