The Race Idea in Reproductive Technologies: Beyond Epistemic Scientism and Technological Mastery

Abstract

This paper explores the limitations of epistemic scientism for understanding the role the concept of race plays in assisted reproductive technology (ART) practices. Two major limitations centre around the desire to use scientific knowledge to bring about social improvement. In the first case, undue focus is placed on debunking the scientific reality of racial categories and characteristics. The alternative to this approach is to focus instead on the way the race idea functions in ART practices. Doing so reveals how the race idea (1) helps to define the reproductive "problems" different groups of women are experiencing and to dictate when and how they should be "helped"; (2) helps to resolve tensions about who should be considered the real parents of children produced by reproductive technologies; and (3) is used to limit ART use where that use threatens to denaturalize the very sociopolitical landscape the race idea has created. In the second case, scientific knowledge regarding reproduction is thought to call for technological control over that reproduction. This leads to an overemphasis on personal responsibility and a depoliticization of racialized social inequalities.

Making and breaking families – reading queer reproductions, stratified reproduction and reproductive justice together

“…Studies of transnational and forced adoption show that the logics of race, class, and nation have been central to dekinning children and parents from one another for far longer than ART has been available (Choy, 2009;Gordon, 2001;Howell, 2006;Marre and Briggs, 2009). Not surprisingly, then, feminist and critical race scholars have found continuing neoand post-colonial echoes in the ways in which caste, class, racial and ethnic hierarchies still structure the delivery and marketing of ART (Andreassen, 2017;Davda, 2018;Homanen, 2018;Inhorn and Fakih, 2006;Quiroga, 2007;Russell, 2015;Thompson, 2005Thompson, , 2009Thompson, , 2011Twine, 2015). For example, poor women, and women who are the direct descendants of formerly enslaved or colonized people in the USA, continue to face barriers to fertility.…”

Redefining Bioavailability through Migrant Egg Donors in Spain

“…A Russian woman, Ira, was in Barcelona on holiday when she took the opportunity to inquire about donation and the option of temporary visits to implement the donation. Furthermore, the women in our study shared the experience of migrant precarity and phenotypical desirability (Russell, 2015) that facilitated their becoming egg providers.…”

“Mix or Match?”: Transnational Fertility Industry and White Desirability

“…The only time blackness makes its media appearance in assisted reproduction is in stories of lawsuits and couples suing clinics and gamete banks for "malpractice," often involving a white woman being "mistakenly" inseminated with black sperm and suing the gamete bank for damages. While Roberts comments on the invisibility of blackness, others observe the link between race and reproduction as an incessant desire to racially match one's offspring (Almeling 2007;Ikemoto 1995;Kroløkke 2014;Quiroga 2007;Russell 2015). These scholars have demonstrated a fundamental irony of race in assisted reproduction -while social scientists continue to argue that race is a social construct, these technologies reinforce the concept of race as a biological category, and shared race as shared kinship.…”