Reproductive technologies and their associated forms of commodification and profit-making emerged in the 1980s. Since then, these technologies have evolved into a global fertility industry that constitutes a highly dynamic economic sector today. In her article, Susanne Lettow maps the emerging trajectories of reproductive bioeconomies in neo-authoritarian capitalism and suggests pathways for critique and resistance.
*
The reproductive bioeconomy encompasses the production, circulation, and consumption of reproductive bodily substances. The respective technologies as well as the technoscientific and clinical infrastructures are expanding rapidly, both technologically and economically. Predicted annual growth rates for the next five to ten years range between nine to ten percent.
An increasing amount of private equity and venture capital is being invested in the fertility sector, leading to the emergence of new economic actors and enterprises, such as egg banks, brokers, and other intermediaries that connect surrogates, egg donors, intended parents, and fertility clinics. According to Kathrin Braun, this restructuring is being driven by the logic of profit maximization, often at the expense of medical ethics. Concurrently, the physiological process of the conception, gestation, and birth of a child is becoming increasingly fragmented into technologically mediated procedures including gamete retrieval, in-vitro-fertilization, implantation, gestation and birth that are accompanied by various forms of screening and selection.
In light of the multiple relations of power and exploitation that structure the present global reproductive bioeconomy in terms of gender, class, race, and the colonial legacies underpinning the uneven development of the world economy, there is no reason to assume that emerging technoscientific practices will be less exploitative. On the contrary, current trajectories of the reproductive economy point toward an intensification of exploitation as well as of the eugenic and selective implications of reproductive technologies in the context of the rise of neo-authoritarian capitalism.
Against this backdrop, an emancipatory politicalization of the reproductive bioeconomy is urgently needed. Over the last years, groups and organizations such as Bioskop, Gen-ethisches Netzwerk or fem*ini against reproductive exploitation have articulated critiques of reproductive technologies and practices such as egg donation and surrogacy while at the same time rejecting essentialist, romanticized notions of conception, pregnancy, and the (heterosexual) family. As Susanne Schultz argues, such essentialist and romanticized notions are frequently invoked by conservative and right-wing actors who adopt a critical stance towards the reproductive bioeconomy by defending ‘natural’ reproduction. From the perspective of an emancipatory politicization of the reproductive bioeconomy, however, the central issue is not the ‘de-naturalization’ of heterosexual reproduction through technology, but rather the exploitative structures and biopolitical dynamics that shape the reproductive economy.
What is therefore at stake is thus the development of societal relations grounded in reproductive justice. From this perspective, it is crucial to analyze the current dynamics of the reproductive bioeconomy and to situate them within the broader transformations towards a new accumulation regime and a neo-authoritarian form of capitalism.
Exploring the “fourth phase”
It appears that, in the wake of the disruptions to the global flows and networks caused by the COVID 19-pandemic and Russia’s fulls-scale invasion of Ukraine – formerly one of the central surrogacy markets in Europe – , the development of the reproductive bioeconomy has entered a “fourth phase.”
The earlier phases since the 1980s were characterized by continuous expansion and, particularly since the 1990s, by neoliberal globalization. Much like other economic sectors, neoliberal globalization capitalized on global disparities in wages and legal regulations. However, the pandemic and the emergence of a “global war regime” have led to a significant restructuring of the global reproductive bioeconomy. This restructuring coincides with further economic expansion and the technoscientific differentiation of supply structures. It also coincides with the rise of authoritarian, pro-natalist, and neo-eugenic biopolitics, at least in Europe and the United States.
Jennifer Denbow argues that “investors are funding everything from artificial gestation to making gametes from stem cells to digital platforms and apps offering services such as period tracking, a ‘sexual well-being’ platform for men, and LGBTQIA+ targeted reproductive healthcare apps.” Accordingly, the scope of the reproductive bioeconomy continues to expand, while new categories of consumers and reproductive demands are simultaneously being produced.
Although egg cell donation and surrogacy remain central to the functioning of the reproductive economy, current research into in-vitro-gametogenesis, into artificial wombs and uterus transplantation contributes to this process of inventing new services and markets.
At the same time, these technoscientific projects converge with developments in other sectors of the bioeconomy and of the digital economy. For example, the genome-editing technique CRISPR-Cas9 is employed both in synthetic biology, which aims at the creation of so-called ‘new-to-nature’ products, and in gamete and embryo editing, practices that remain widely prohibited yet have nevertheless been the subject of scientific research for more than a decade. In addition, AI is now widely used for gamete selection and embryo screening procedures.
Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that tech oligarchs such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk actively support and promote the reproductive bioeconomy. Their influence on the development of the reproductive bioeconomy is thereby both economic and biopolitical. By advancing a pronatalist agenda and forms of neo-eugenic thinking that, as Quinn Slobodian has recently shown, have long been embedded in neoliberal and libertarian thought they contribute to a political articulation of the reproductive bioeconomy that reinforces contemporary processes of fascization.
A new “formation of reproduction”?
For an emancipatory politicization of the reproductive bioeconomy, it is therefore crucial to situate its dynamics within the larger context of the current political and economic conjuncture. Although it is still impossible to speak of a fully consolidated new regime of accumulation, it nevertheless seems possible to discern emerging post-neoliberal dynamics based on the convergence of digitalization and biotechnology. These dynamics combine radicalized neoliberal austerity and a shrinking of the liberal democratic-elements of the state that mediate inequalities and social conflict through socio-economic and symbolic means, as for example social security systems or diversity politics.
What role, then, does the reproductive bioeconomy play within this conjuncture? Certainly, fertility has become a new economic frontier and an increasingly profitable field of accumulation. Beyond this, however, the reproductive bioeconomy also points toward the emergence of a new “formation of reproduction” in the sense proposed by Michelle Murphy. As Murphy argues, generational reproduction – that is, the procreation, conception, gestation, and birth of a child –, is never merely an individual endeavor. Rather, it is constituted through multiple social relations and institutions, including political, economic, and technological infrastructures and discourses.
Reproduction is therefore not confined to the processes of individual bodies. For Murphy, historical “formations of reproduction” differ significantly according to the ways in which the “generative capacities of sexed living beings are rearranged, revalued, and brought into new alignment and attachments.”
These formations of reproduction can, I think, best be understood as central elements of historically specific accumulation regimes. Such regimes comprise particular configurations of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption that are structured through corresponding modes of political regulation and gender relations – that is, historically shifting arrangements between the private household and the profit-driven capitalist economy.
With regard to the current dynamics of the reproductive bioeconomy, the economic valorization of fertility seems to lie at the heart of an ongoing re-structuring and re-positioning of the private household and the intimate sphere. Indeed, the reproductive bioeconomy transgresses and reconfigures the relationship between the supposedly private sphere of intimate family and kinship relations and the capitalist economy of commodity production, wage labor, and profit-making. In this respect, it differs significantly from both the Fordist and the neoliberal accumulation regimes.
The Fordist regime commodified the household and leisure time through mass-production and mass-consumption of consumer goods and relied on the breadwinner-housewife model as its dominant gender arrangement. The neoliberal accumulation regime, by contrast, promoted the adult-worker model on the basis of widespread precarization. This transformation was accompanied by the emergence of a low wage sector for care and other services that became disembedded from the household.
By contrast, the emerging neo-authoritarian accumulation regime appears to rest, first, on the production of high-tech goods and services through digital and bioeconomic modes of extracting value from data and bodies and, second, on forms of elite consumption organized within enclave economies. These forms of consumption stand in stark contrast to the low or underconsumption experienced by growing numbers of highly precarized people who are excluded from formalized and regulated labor markets and can often bring to market little more than their personal data or bodily capacities. Within this emerging regime, the capitalization of fertility seems to play a crucial role.
Thus, as Susi Geiger argues, it is crucial to understand the current obsession with demography, fertility, and eugenics articulated by leading figures in the U.S. high-tech sector, “in its broader context of technology-driven world-building.” However, the inverse is equally true: the economic valorization and technoscientific restructuring of fertility can itself be understood as a cornerstone of the formation of new authoritarian forms of governance, control, and (eugenic) selection.
Towards emancipatory politicization of the reproductive bioeconomy
The reproductive bioeconomy and its current trajectories are profoundly political. They cannot be understood as isolated matters of medical policy or as purely ethical questions that can be delegated to bioethical committees. Certainly, ethical considerations concerning reproductive freedom and its limits remain crucial, particularly with regard to the question of whose desires, wishes, and bodies are recognized and whose not. This issue becomes especially visible in the structural inequalities between financially privileged intended parents and those for whom the payments associated with egg donation or surrogacy – often regarded by the former as negligible sums – constitute an income that can scarcely be obtained through other forms of labor.
At the same time, however, the reproductive justice movement has long argued that reproductive justice in the full sense of the term requires a far more comprehensive transformation of the gendered, racialized, and socio-economically stratified conditions under which people decide whether or not to have children and under which they raise them. Such a perspective extends from access to high-quality reproductive healthcare services, including abortion, to the social and cultural infrastructures necessary for children and caregivers to flourish, including adequate housing, education, and public care infrastructures. It also encompasses labor-market regulations that enable people with children to secure a sufficient income while allowing adequate time for care work.
Situating the reproductive bioeconomy within the current socio-historical conjuncture and the emergence of neo-authoritarian capitalism thus reveals the urgent need for a comprehensive politicization of its economic, technoscientific, and biopolitical dimensions. From this perspective, struggles over reproductive justice should be understood as central to emancipatory contestations of the contemporary authoritarian drift.