Catherine Waldby,
"Citizenship, Labor, and the Biopolitics of the Bioeconomy:
Recruiting Female Tissue Donors for Stem-Cell Research"
(page 2 of 5)
Fertility outsourcing is a set of practices
that redistribute fertility and reproduction of children across a number
of different bodies: for example, in vitro fertilization, artificial
insemination, superovulation, and other similar kinds of processes that
have been developed within reproductive medicine and applied to human
beings since the 1970s.
Now, in the 1980s and early 1990s, we see the development of a
business model that arose in the United States, which revolves around
commercial gestational surrogacy and oöcyte vending. This business
model, through a contractual process, secures the reproductive capacity
of surrogates, and oöcyte vendors for the use of 'intending parents,' in
exchange for fees.
It took quite awhile for the contractual form to be elaborated and to
be embedded in a commercially secure way; and certainly it differs from
state to state in the United States. California has been the state that
has provided the most secure legal and commercial environment for
fertility outsourcing, in the sense that it treats surrogacy contracts
as enforceable, and it has effectively become the state that has the
most elaborated fertility outsourcing industry in the world.
But this business model is being exported. Primarily driven by price
competition, of course in California and in the United States more
generally, the cost of this kind of purchasing, this kind of gestational
and fertility services, has gone up; we are now seeing the development of
competition sites elsewhere in the world, such as India. The Indian
state is very busily marketing its female population as reproductive
laborers and their surplus reproductive capacities as national assets.
Since the Indian government became a signatory to the World Trade
Organization, to treaties that create intellectual property agreements
and the general agreement on tariff and services, it has created a safe
commercial environment for medical tourism, which includes reproductive
tourism. The External Affairs Ministry has also created a category of
medical visa to facilitate medical tourism.
Clinical trials also, are being increasingly conducted off-shore in
less expensive sites, rather than in the United States or in Western
Europe. Essentially, you can conduct your clinical trial in a much more
low-cost environment, where you have much better access to experimental
populations who will come forward for a much lower fee, and will make
themselves available for clinical trial research to simply get temporary
access to health care.
But also, now there have been a number of clinics that have sprung
up, which focus particularly on gestational surrogacy. Surrogacy is
interesting because it's a very potentially global industry, in the
sense that the surrogate does not make a genetic contribution to the
child.
Now, it seems to me that a great deal of what fertility outsourcing
is about is the reproduction of whiteness—of course that is not the
only thing as there are other groups that will seek surrogacy services,
like, for example the Japan/Korea circuit (since closed down after the
Hwang scandal). It is the reproduction of whiteness because that is
where the money is. So, it's quite possible to locate your clinic in
India, where the government treats commercial surrogacy as enforceable,
and have your primary market, for example, in the United States or
Australia, where surrogacy is often financially or legally prohibitive.
On a website for a fertility clinic in Mumbai, the thing which is
most alarming is that the site is full of photographs of lovely blonde,
blue-eyed mothers with lovely blonde, blue-eyed babies. There is not a
single photograph of anyone that looks like they live anywhere other
than the richest, whitest suburbs of Southern California. You would
never in a million years know, looking at the people who are represented
on the site, that there was any relationship whatsoever to anyone in
India. What strikes me about this is that you have this contractual and
genetic arrangement whereby you can travel to India, you can make a baby
that looks like you, and you can take the baby home, and there is no
trace of the relation to the actual surrogate herself. There is no
genetic trace, and there is no contractual trace because the surrogate
has no recourse in law. She has no recourse in law because the contracts
are treated as enforceable.
If we're looking at oöcyte vending—again, we really need to move
outside the United States—the way in which oöcyte vending has been
globalized has been through the development of these transnational
fertility clinics that recruit vendors from populations that are
phenotypically similar to purchasers, but are divided by regulatory
boundaries. For example, in Spain (I think the only country in Western
Europe that has commercial oöcyte vending), oöcytes are drawn from the
local student populations; but also, from Eastern European women.
Eastern Europe has developed a circuit whereby one of the ways you can
improve your probably fairly low income is to travel, for example, from
the Ukraine to Spain, and spend a month or two undergoing
superovulation, being paid about 1,000 Euro or 1,500 Euro, before going
back to the Ukraine. There are women who do this maybe three times a
year. It may be their primary source of income and in any case is a
very substantial source of income for them. There are anecdotally some
crossovers with the sex industry as well, where women will go and work
in the fertility clinics, and then also work in the local sex industry,
and then go home.
So this is what I mean when I say a phenotypically similar population
divided by regulatory boundaries: Northern Europeans travelling to Spain
because they can purchase eggs from women who have appropriately
Northern European features—blue eyes and fair skin. Again, we can see
the logics of the reproduction of whiteness working here, because this
is where the money is, and I don't think it takes a huge leap of
imagination to see that this is a kind of informal labor.
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