This interdisciplinary Kone Foundation funded project takes as its focus the ethics of reproductive technologies: Ethical evaluation essential to the acceptance, regulation, dissemination, participation in, and marketisation of reproductive technologies. Ethical deliberation is done by all kinds of actors in the arena of reproductive technologies, such as policy makers, bioethicists, medical professionals, market players, patients, and donors of reproductive tissue and of reproductive labour. The project brings together methods, perspectives, and scholars from social science and the academic field of bioethics in order to examine ethics. It explores a wide variety of cases of technological practice that have, or may in the future, become normalised as uncontroversial in some (delimited) cultural contexts.
Reproductive technologies (RTs) are no longer new or cutting-edge science. Indeed, in many parts of the world, they have become a mundane everyday practice. For example, involuntary childlessness is now regarded as a condition that follows IVF (in vitro fertilisation) rather than precedes it. One could argue that IVF and other RTs have become normalised and naturalised as ways to make babies, parents, and kin. However, whatever the (new) normalities, natures, or standards that have been produced with respect to reproductive technologies, they are not stable but are a result of, and are constantly subject to ongoing political negotiations and ethical disputation. takes as its focus the ongoing ethical deliberation about reproductive technologies. The study will advance academic discussions on bioethics, the normalisation of RTs and the affect of growing markets on society and social inequality. The study will also have implications for healthcare and political significance in providing useful knowledge for professionals, bioethicists and policymakers.
This project team consists of four researchers: Principal Investigator, Dr, docent Riikka Homanen, Dr Mwenza Blell, PhD student (and later Postdoctoral researcher) Tiia Sudenkaarne and a PhD student to be recruited for 2020.
Funding source
Kone Foundation