Fertility Travel: The Commodification of Human Reproduction

Assisted reproduction in a global world produces not only new babies and new parents but also new citizens and raises new bioethical concerns (e.g., Campbell 2007; Franklin 2001; Thompson 2005). This essay outlines an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective in understanding how fertility travel and transnational reproduction unfold from the perspectives of the different actors involved. Three theoretical pairs—care and engineering, reproscapes and reproflows, and gifts and commodities—are suggested as theoretical frameworks for understanding transnationalized reproduction. The authors conclude that reproductive movements and fragmentary bodies confront legal and administrative systems in interesting and often highly complex ways.