In the Israeli "start-up nation" biotechnology has emerged as one of the most thriving knowledge-intensive industries. Particularly the med-tech and repro-tech sector are widely regarded as world-class in their ability to develop experimental therapies and medicines based on topnotch "pioneering" biomedical research. These developments have rightly been

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.

Since the early 2000s transnational surrogacy has emerged as a new capitalist frontier founded on the intensification of the commodification of women's reproductive labours, bodies and biologies. This has resulted in academic and policy debates on whether to outlaw surrogacy altogether or to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic forms of surrogacy. Rather than tackling surrogacy in moralising terms of 'altruistic' gift-giving versus 'greedy' money-making, in this article we draw on feminist political economy literature on social reproduction to propose an integrative reproductive labour perspective that looks at the dialectics of waged and unwaged work involved in the process of (re)producing people. Drawing on empirical research data on commercial surrogacy in Georgia, we analyse how this dialectical relation between exploitation of waged work (surrogate) and appropriation of unwaged work (mother) operates on the workfloor. We explore Maria Mies' concept of 'housewifization' to argue that processes of exploitation are deepened in the Georgian surrogacy industry, partially because surrogates refrain/are refrained from identifying as workers and as such are not afforded labour rights nor considered to produce value.

The introduction to the Special Section “Global Fertility Chains and the Colonial Present of Assisted Reproductive Technologies” (re)situates assisted reproductive technologies, infrastructures, and markets within older, yet ongoing, histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and slavery. Engaging with the “colonial present” of a broad array of reproductive technologies, including surrogacy, adoption, seed saving, “slave breeding,” and in vitro fertilization in different (post)colonial sites of inquiry, including India, Korea, Australia, the United States, and the borderlands between Mexico and Guatemala, the papers in this collection draw on the foundational work of materialist, STS, Black, Indigenous, and decolonial feminists to foreground three main “relational” themes: (1) between past and present colonial materializations and imaginaries of ARTs; (2) between colonialism’s myriad, intraconnected reproductive grammars of slavery, genocide, conservation, exploitation, and extraction; (3) between ART’s life and death functions and their mutually constitutive biopolitical and necropolitical logics.

The first French clinical trial using human embryonic stem cells for regenerative purposes was launched in 2014, using the I6 stem cell line that was imported from Israel. From Israel to France, national reproductive policies and practices inform how basic scientists produce, manage and circulate cells across countries. Building on an interdisciplinary co-production involving two social scientists and a life scientist, this article suggests that biobanks passage cells from in vitro fertilization to stem cell science and from country to country by modifying their reproductive meaning. Four passages are described: the absence of cells in 2005 when the research started in France; the presence of supernumerary embryos available for research in Israeli IVF biobanks; the production of the I6 stem cell bank in Israel; the importation and laboratory biobanking of the cells in France. Human embryonic stem cell lines can never be completely disentangled from reproduction.