Stratified Reproduction
By Gina Maranto, Biopolitical Times guest contributor
| 08. 03. 2011
In a slim new volume, Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market (Routledge, 2011), France Winddance Twine provides multiple accounts of the ways in which racism, classism, and colorism permeate the international market for wombs and gametes. For example, Twine cites the story of a Japanese woman who backs out of a surrogacy arrangement when she learns that the gestational mother, whom she had selected on the basis of her profile and skin color, is Korean. And there is the case of the black woman seeking IVF services who is "policed" in her choices by white doctors who insist it would be "inappropriate" for her to use "white" sperm if "black" sperm were available in the bank. Or the admission of the white, would-be surrogate who tells a researcher that she would carry "a Japanese baby or a Chinese baby because they are white to me," but says that "to give birth to a Black child would add one more controversial aspect to my life and I'm not ready to be on the front...
Related Articles
Reproductive rights have been a flashpoint in national politics for decades, with the stakes surging after the Supreme Court shredded the right to an abortion. In the current presidential campaign, the battle over abortion has swelled and morphed to encompass in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has now moved rapidly from widely accepted to partisan hot button.
This dramatic shift was highlighted by the February decision of the Alabama Supreme Court that granted personhood rights to frozen IVF embryos, signaling that...
By Annalee Armstrong, BioSpace | 09.11.2024
Complex gene therapies are starting to hit the market but all have faced the same reality: a tepid reception from the healthcare system and a cloudy path to profitability.
It can take about a year for a patient to go...
By Julia Brown, The Conversation | 08.16.2024
With their primary goal to advance scientific knowledge, most scientists are not trained or incentivized to think through the societal implications of the technologies they are developing. Even in genomic medicine, which is geared toward benefiting future patients, time and...
By Smriti Mallapaty, Nature | 09.11.2024
Under his microscope, Jun Wu could see several tiny spheres, each less than 1 millimetre wide. They looked just like human embryos: a dark cluster of cells surrounded by a cavity, and then another ring of cells.
But Wu, a...