Global Fertility Chains

An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

Bibliographic Data

ID5407242
AuthorsSigrid Vertommen (0000-0003-1648-8795, Ghent University, corresponding author), Vincenzo Pavone (0000-0002-2326-0118, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Michal Nahman (0000-0001-9933-5772, University of the West of England, Bristol, United Kingdom)
Year2022
Volume47
Issue1
Pages112-145
Publication date2022-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0162243921996460
OpenAlexW3135483466
LanguageEN
Citations received30
References cited88

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country-based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of "global fertility chains." The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women's waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain

Biology · Commodity · Coproduction · Economics · Economy · Market economy · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Reproduction · Sociology · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · Engineering · Reproductive Health and Technologies · Ecology