Having a baby of ‘one’s own’ is increasingly being outsourced: reproductive tissue and labour are obtained from others as commercial services, often across national borders. This Academy Research Fellow project is concerned with the enrollment of ethical valuation that goes into maintaining, altering, advancing and participating in reproductive outsourcing, which has grown into a multi-million euro business. The research data is collected through ethnographic fieldwork at private fertility clinics and healthcare companies with links to international enterprises in Finland, and accompanying Finnish residents travelling across borders. The data consists of video-recordings, observations, interviews and documentary material.
To meet the growing demand demand for donor reproductive tissue the multimillion-euro fertility industry increasingly recruits, particularly, women as donors and surrogates from all over the world, and tailors its treatments to people willing to travel. This reliance on donor women’s reproductivity marks commercial outsourcing as a kind of biocapitalism. This Academy Research Fellow project is concerned with the enrollment of ethical valuation that goes into maintaining, altering, advancing and participating in the fertility industry and markets. The enrollment of ethical deliberation will be addressed through analysis of how participants in reproductive outsourcing, including patients, donors, medical professionals and different market players, make ethical evaluations of vulnerability and weigh up their own self-interest versus the interest of others.The project contributes to feminist social scientific discussions on reproductive technologies, healthcare services and markets. The study will also have implication for healthcare and political significance in providing useful knowledge for professionals, bioethicists and policy makers.
The project will proceed in three co-constructive work packages. Work package 1 "Outsourcing Reproduction in/to Finland" will study the ethical labour of fertility clinics recruiting gamete (sperm and egg) donors, donors themselves and cross-border reproductive travellers coming to Finland for donor treatments. Work package 2 "Outsourcing Finnish Reproduction" explores Finnish residents’ travel to access donor tissue. The actors and agencies of the outsourcing markets and industries are the focus of work package 3 "Bioeconomies of Reproductive Outsourcing". This work package will unfold the logics of value in the bioeconomy of reproductive outsourcing.This subproject will lift EEROS to the level of ambitious theory and wrap up the project.
Funding source
Academy of Finland