Reproductive Tourism: Through the Anthropological “Reproscope”

Abstract

This review analyzes the emerging literature on reproductive tourism through a metaphorical “reproscope,” focusing largely on cross-border egg donation and surrogacy as the prime areas of contemporary anthropological investigation. While acknowledging that reproductive travel is not new, this article recognizes that there has been an increased volume of such travel over the past couple of decades. It provides an overview of the major areas of anthropological investigation into these transnational phenomena, globalization, stratification, exploitation, race, nationalism, religion, biopower, and bioethics. I propose that these areas of investigation may provide key indications about the preoccupations of anthropology today. Namely, what kind of discipline does anthropology imagine itself to be?

Reproductive mobilities

“…A subsequent wave of scholarship in the early 2000s put into even sharper focus the increasing role of global markets in the provision of bioproducts and biotechnologies that had far-reaching implications for human reproduction. This body of scholarship responded to the touristic, commoditized aspects of the global repro-markets proliferating at the start of the new millennium, especially in destinations such as India (Deomampo 2016;Vora 2015), Israel (Nahman 2013), and Thailand (Whittaker and Speier 2010). Emphasis was placed on the new routes, networks, and assemblages (Martin 2009;Pande 2011) that emerged out of globally organized reproduction, alongside the bodies, technologies, and substances (Nahman 2008;Tober 2001) that were crossing international borders for the purpose of producing babies and offspring within 'global repro-scapes' (Inhorn and Shrivastav 2010).…”

“…Emphasis was placed on the new routes, networks, and assemblages (Martin 2009;Pande 2011) that emerged out of globally organized reproduction, alongside the bodies, technologies, and substances (Nahman 2008;Tober 2001) that were crossing international borders for the purpose of producing babies and offspring within 'global repro-scapes' (Inhorn and Shrivastav 2010). Scholarly analyses zeroed in on the political-economic influences of large-scale dynamicscolonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, consumerism, and late capitalismon local reproductive practices and norms (Bergmann 2011;Franklin 2011;Gürtin and Inhorn 2011;Nahman 2016;Twine 2015).…”

“…Mobilities studies has been critiqued for its foundation in a nomadic male who draws from a Eurocentric (white) theoretical tradition, a foundation that has not fully engaged with feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. At the same time, in much of the cross-border reproductive care scholarship, women are understood as reproductive subjects within the binary categories of hyper-mobile IVF clients and intended parents or constrained-in-place reproductive labourers and bodies for extraction (Nahman 2013). Reproductive mobilities opens up space for heterogeneous embodiments within the politics of mobility and immobility.…”

Multiple mobilities in Mexico’s fertility industry

“…The notion of 'traffic' implies the 'trafficking of women and their donor gametes' (Inhorn and Patrizio 2012, 510) across borders where they are 'eggs-ploited' (Pfeffer 2011) in a global bioeconomy which 'outsources' reproductive labor to certain women. The concept of 'reverse traffic' hence turns the 'reproscope' (Nahman 2016a) upside down, putting in its focus the reproductive travels and experiences of oocyte vendors and surrogate laborers rather than the cross-border movements of reproductive consumers. While the term 'reverse traffic' has come to stand for the travels of global egg donors (Kroløkke 2015;Vlasenko 2015), Nahman's original work contains a broader understanding of this term, when she argues that 'the doctors, embryologists, gametes, hormones and equipment all make transnational journeys rather than the patients' (Nahman 2011, 627).…”

Migrant extractability: Centring the voices of egg providers in cross-border reproduction

“…One ‘group’ (and I use this term loosely, for commissioning parents and egg providers are anything but a cohesive group of people) can be found taking out second mortgages, loans and credit cards in order to afford to become global consumers of cross-border reproductive services (because it is too expensive or unavailable ‘back home’) (Speier, 2016). Meanwhile, the other ‘group’, largely financially precarious women/mothers, living abroad, are providing eggs in exchange for money in order to afford to care for their children and families, complete their studies or just survive (Almeling, 2011; Marre et al, 2017; Nahman, 2016). It is this entwined economic and migratory relationship that forms the backdrop to this paper about the experiences and voices of female migrant egg providers in Spain.…”