Nobody's Child, Everybody's Children:

Reproductive Tourism: Challenges for Transnational Feminisms

Coined in 1991 by Knoppers and Lebris, reproductive tourism refers to the traveling of individuals from one country or jurisdiction where treatment is not available to another country or jurisdiction where they can obtain the kinds of medically assisted reproduction they desire. Over the years, the rate of reproductive tourism has dramatically increased because more individuals are used to traveling and more are much better informed by means of the Internet about both policies in other countries and fertility clinics.

While most feminists would posit that women have a right to self determination over their own bodies, the development and globalization of new reproductive technologies pose complex and unforeseen challenges worldwide. Using reproductive tourism as an example, this paper seeks to tease out and disrupt methodological and theoretical assumptions within transnational feminist theories. Women and their partners’ use of technologies for assisted conception and the local and global transactions in reproductive body parts form a testing ground for transnational feminisms.  For instance, the field of biological  reproduction and globalization—understood as the rapid growth of global capitalism—has brought in its wake an extension of a new consumer culture creating different regimes of consumption. Not only have women’s bodies been thrown onto the world market for trafficking, the human body and its parts (organ, tissues, and cells) have been turned into commodities that are exchanged and traded (Gupta 2006). Women and their partners operate in this marketplace both as buyers and sellers, which is a recent phenomenon.  Therefore, do the construction of individual rights and the buying and selling of the human body and its parts still leave some grounds for women’s collective struggles?

Additionally, there is an uneven terrain, in that some nations and regions within nations (e.g. major metropolises) have achieved greater access to these “fruits of globalization” than others.  Even in the West—and then on magnified terms in the non-Western world—lines of demarcation between gender, race, class, and nationality have been brought into great relief vis-à-vis access to these technologies. Some women and their partners are able to achieve their reproductive desires, often through recourse to globalizing technologies, while others cannot. Consequently, the challenges posed by reproductive tourism for transnational feminisms require new responses, which can begin by re-examining the theoretical and methodological assumptions which this paper seeks to address.