Gendered ethics of reproductive time: science, technology and the market (2024-2028)
The temporal logics of reproduction are being changed in novel ways by recent developments in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), the growing commercialisation of healthcare, and the rapid expansion of biotechnological and pharmaceutical enterprises. Technological practices have demonstrated that reproductive time is not “a given fact of life” but constructed by science, technology, and bioindustry. Further, the temporalities involved in reproduction result from and are subject to constant political negotiations and ethical disputes. Norms regarding reproductive time are imposed on people in ways that map onto existing intersectional oppressions including gender, race, class, sexuality and disability, contributing to the stratification of reproduction in general.
This Academy Project is concerned with how time modified by ARTs becomes the subject of ethical evaluation. It considers three technological practices in the interrelated sites of science, healthcare and bioindustry: 1) reproductive tissue donation; 2) gamete/embryo cryopreservation; 3) health-data-driven artificial intelligence and machine learning apps in fertility treatments. To conceptualise these practices, the project mobilises the notions of ethical labour and queer bioethics in a framework that acknowledges the importance of affectivity in ethics. By exploring ethical evaluations, the study seeks to account for the moral ambivalences of ARTs and their temporal consequences as both oppressive and enabling.
By combining social sciences and academic bioethics, the study will overcome the dichotomy between empirical and normative approaches, which to date has characterised research on reproductive technologies and perpetuated intellectual weaknesses in both approaches. The project will also have political and healthcare implications, providing useful knowledge for professionals, bioethicists and policymakers. It will help to pinpoint how gendered and social inequalities emerge in practice.
The project focuses on Finland, where a state-funded Nordic welfare system is combined with a growing transnational commercial care business. The methodological orientation of the research is multi-sited ethnography and theoretical analysis. The research material consists of video recordings, observations, interviews and documents collected from fertility clinics, research institutions, healthcare companies and agencies.
The project includes PI Homanen and four Co-Investigators: Dr Mwenza Blell, Postdoc Tiia Sudenkaarne, Postdoc Katriina Huttunen and PhD Student Veera Pelkonen. We also have two affiliate members: PhD students Kaisa Naskali–Buddle and Sanna Poelman.
Everyday Ethics of Reproductive Outsourcing:
Making Good Life in the Era of Biocapitalism (EEROS)(2019-2024)
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. To meet this demand 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 (2019-2024, Project no 321711) is concerned with the enrolment of ethical valuation that goes into maintaining, altering, advancing and participating in the fertility industry and markets. The enrolment of ethical deliberation will be addressed through analysis of how participants in reproductive outsourcing, including patients, donors, medical professionals and different market players, deal in practice with their experiences of moral ambivalence, make ethical evaluations of vulnerability and weigh up their own self-interest versus the interest of others.
To conceptualise the practices the EEROS project will mobilise the notion of ethical labour. Through an exploration of ethical labour the study seeks to problematise the assumption that markets for reproductive outsourcing are merely another extension to the historical extraction of surplus value from women’s bodies. It will show that it is theoretically possible and laudable to exceed the current, commonly used binary construction of fertility markets and technologies as either categorically oppressive or empowering. The study will also have implications for healthcare and political significance in providing useful knowledge for professionals, bioethicists and policymakers. It will help pinpoint the ways in which social and gendered inequalities and exploitation emerge in practice.
The project focuses on the case of Finland, which has become a destination of choice for reproductive travel in the Nordic region and which combines a state-funded Nordic welfare system with a growing commercial care business. The methodological orientation of the research is multi-sited ethnography, and the research material consists of video-recordings, observations, interviews and documentary material. The material is collected at private fertility clinics and healthcare companies with links to international enterprises in Finland, and accompanying Finnish residents travelling across borders, presumably to Baltic countries and Eastern Europe.
mARKETISATION AND SOCIAL INEQUITIES IN REPRODUCTIVE HEALTHCARE (2014-2017)
This postdoctoral project explored social relations, such as kin, gender, class and ethnic relations, in reproductive healthcare in the context of late consumer capitalism. More specifically, it studies the relatively recent changes linked to the marketisation of healthcare in the practices of care for infertility, pregnancy, childbirth and abortion. It has been noted, for example, that marketisation tends to turn passive patients into active consumers and to commodify care interventions and human tissue like gametes, foetuses and, especially, women’s bodies. Furthermore, markets for medical services have become more transnational in that people travel across state borders to access care. These issues will be addressed through analysis of how all participants in care, including professionals, patients/clients, donors, gametes, foetuses, embryos and technologies, are engaged and related in the practices of both public and private sector healthcare. Through an exploration of the engagement of participants and their relations in care, the study seeks to account for the ways in which consumer principles are realised in the care practices, and how some people seem to be granted more reproductive agency and freedom than others. The study also has theoretical and practical objectives. Theoretically, the research project aims to broaden feminist and social scientific discussions on social relations and (reproductive) agency based on the empirical study. The study will also have implications for healthcare in providing useful knowledge for professionals and policy makers. It will help to pinpoint the ways in which social and gendered inequities emerge in practice. The methodological orientation of the research is multi-sited ethnography, and the research material consists of video-recordings, observations, interviews and documentary material. The material is collected at four publicly funded maternity clinics, and at three private sector healthcare clinics that offer services for medical tourists within and beyond the national borders. The focus of the study is on the case of Finland and its service system, which combines a historical state-funded primary care system with a growing commercial care business with expanding prospects. The analysis of the material owes much to feminist studies of technoscience in material-semiotic practices and their acknowledgement of the heterogeneity, instability and fluidity of subjects and objects, of agency and of logics of power.