Reproductive Technologies as Global Form / Eigene und fremde Welten Bd.19 (PDF)

UK Donorlink to potentially find half-siblings and donors via DNA testing. Ukwu shook her head and said that she did not understand at all what was motivating these searches or why the HFEA should make available the information she was just punching into her keyboard in 18 years: "My family is from Cameroon and my father, the man who raised me, my mother's partner, also isn't my biological father. Why should I care about that?" Ukwu asked. "Where my family is from," she added, "it's normal that children are raised away from their biological parents. Don't people in Britain have more important things to do than look for their sperm donor or half-siblings they have nothing to do with?" She shook her head in a gesture as if she viewed such endeavors as English extravagance. Then she offered her view as a biologist: "Medical histories of family members have become less important nowadays anyhow; you can simply use genetic testing if you want to know something about risk susceptibilities." The donor-conceived adults Maren Klotz met later that night were of a different opinion: They mourned the absence of identifiable donor information for them and cursed that they had been born before the comprehensive regulations on reproductive technologies had come into force in Britain. One of them had spent years being monitored for a hereditary condition prevalent on her father's side before finding out she was donor- conceived. Ukwu's casual commentaries in the ethnographic vignette above capture quite pointedly some of the contemporary questions raised through reproductive technologies within a period of increased globalization, questions which have motivated the compilation of this book: Reproductive technologies have spread across various kinds of boundaries and into socially and culturally diverse settings, situations and regions. However, while people, technologies, human gametes, knowledge and ideas about appropriate regulation circulate widely, the legislation of reproductive technologies is still primarily implemented in territories, whose borders are duly policed by a nation state. Furthermore, local articulations of assisted reproduction in their uneven technological spread across the globe never take place in a social or economical vacuum: They instead become part of emergent national styles of reproductive governance shaped in interaction with local understandings of kinship, the role of "biologies and the biological" , legitimate family forms, prevalent gender asymmetries and economic considerations. As a result, the proliferation of reproductive technologies into different contexts of appropriation does not lead to homogenous forms of deployment. Rather, it has led to a wide range of very different forms of regulation, bans, and approvals as well as to considerable differences in clinical practice, public or private financing, and moral or ethical reasoning. A multi-local configuration has emerged from the multitude of practices that are generating, transferring, acquiring, imagining, and regulating reproductive technologies across and beyond regional and national borders: a transnational or even global "assemblage" that constantly re-defines and re-produces reproductive technologies and its contexts, both locally and globally.

..............................................................283 Maren Klotz & Michi Knecht Transnational Reproductive Mobilities, Materialities, and Agencies Making Interferences: The Cultural Politics of Transnational Ova »Donation« ................................................................................305 Michal Nahman Resemblance that Matters: On Transnational Anonymized Egg Donation in Two European IVF Clinics.....................................331 Sven Bergmann Biomedical Mobilities: Transnational Lab-Benches and Other Space-Effects...........................................................................357 Stefan Beck Notes on Contributors ......................................................................375 Index of Names and Places ................................................................381