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Although research on reproductive technologies such as IVF and egg freezing has traditionally been rather separated from the work on contraceptives and abortion, analysing reproductive and nonreproductive technologies together, as this volume proposes, can provide the basis for a broader contemporary politics of reproductive control. This chapter analyses this politics of integrating reproductive and nonreproductive technologies by focusing specifically on IVF-based fertility (preservation) treatments and (medical) abortion. More specifically, it explores both technologies' interrelated research trajectories and the financial and platformised dimensions of their clinical implementation. With a dual focus on egg freezing and medical abortion, this project seeks to explore how processes of platformisation and financialisation shape the clinical and commercial infrastructures that govern twenty-first-century reproduction. The chapter's broadened analytic scope that incorporates both reproductive and nonreproductive technologies highlights how a contemporary biopolitics of reproductive control may be expressed through these technologies' interrelated regulatory practices, shared politicised reference points (e.g. the embryo), opposite investment practices and mutually reinforcing social effects.

This edited collection proposes an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the study of reproductive technologies (RTs), which reflects the fact that many people use different technologies throughout their lifecourse and resists the disciplinary siloing of research on these technologies. The ever-expanding availability of RTs, the continued roll-out of ‘family planning’ and maternity services across low- and middle-income settings and the rapid development of the fertility industry mean that it is more likely than ever that individuals, especially women and trans* people, will engage with more than one RT at some point in their life. These multiple engagements with RTs will affect users' expectations and uptake, as well as the technologies' availability, commercial success, ethical status and social meanings. We offer this book as part of a wider movement in the study of reproduction and RTs, which takes inspiration from the reproductive justice framework to address forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in the development and application of RTs and the ways in which they are studied and theorised. Here, we introduce the project and outline the structure of the book.

This chapter describes how ambitious, educated, professional women engage with a range of reproductive technologies across their lifetime in an attempt to achieve the much-lauded post-feminist ideal of the perfect ‘work-life balance’ and ‘having it all’. Drawing on interviews, this chapter shares women's experiences of using several reproductive technologies over a 15-year period and how their configurations of bodies, technologies and responsibilities change. In our initial conversations, bodies were seen as a source of disruption to well-laid plans; bodies bled, throbbed, conceived, aborted and were often incompatible with the many social expectations and demands on young women's lives to balance their professional and private lives. At this time, women were attempting to control and direct their malleable bodies using different technologies, a tool, that were accompanied with new gendered responsibilities to make the right choices about if and when to menstruate, to get pregnant, to become a mother and to be intimate. Over time these technologies proved to be imperfect and often failed to deliver the promised future and a counter-narrative emerges in which bodies are not so malleable and technologies are less of tool and more of an additional burden. By looking at interactions of several reproductive technologies over time, experiences of bodies, of technologies and of responsibilities change; they are not static but more cumulative.

Is medically assisted fertilization (with the use of in vitro technology) about “reproductive rights” or about white women's privileges? What is “choice” for white and rich women seems to become a further commodification of the body for women of color and economically disadvantaged women.

Several feminists define reproductive rights by demanding social justice and a type of support for the mothers that does not include expensive technologies, which have a problematic outcome, that of generating a divide between women in the north and women in the south of the world. Some authors also talk about a “division of labor” in reproduction.

The first part of my chapter offers an outline of the historical feminist debate over gender and technology, looking at different positions regarding biotechnologies, and reproductive technologies in a specific way. The second part presents an investigation around the (often racialized) international market of eggs and surrogate mothers in the United States, India and Eastern Europe.

The third part consists of an analysis of few recent studies about the health of women who undergo ovarian hyper-stimulation in order to give eggs as “donation” (under payment); women who offer themselves as surrogate mothers and the children who have been conceived with in vitro fertilization, specifically with heterologue forms (egg donation or surrogate motherhood).

This chapter discusses an instance of spectacular reproduction that circulated in US media during the late 2010s. Through the use of commercial DNA tests, it was revealed that a fertility doctor, Donald Cline, had used his own sperm to impregnate scores of women who had sought fertility treatment from him during the 1980s. More than 60 biogenetic children, now in their mid to late 30s, were identified by early 2020. This instance illustrates several concepts and concerns that might further guide the social and cultural study of human reproduction and especially the uses of reproductive technologies: (1) Most of us encounter instances of extraordinary reproduction from a mediated distance, yet they may shape and inform our expectations and experiences of ordinary reproduction in our everyday lives. How might the concept of spectacle help us understand what is perceived and understood about reproductive technologies? (2) Reproductive technologies offer ‘fixes’ for disruptions of not only reproduction but also kinship. A focus of this chapter is on genetic genealogy tests as a re(tro)productive technology, which produces children, parents, and kinship in hindsight. (3) The social and cultural study of reproductive technologies ought to take a longitudinal approach that both includes a lifecourse perspective and takes into account the historical contexts in which the technologies become developed and individuals encounter them.

This chapter explores the interaction between different kinds of knowledge and representations in the making of the ‘fleshed’ female reproductive body in an Indian city. In particular, it analyzes how women perceive contraception and how the reproductive governance helped to produce the female sterilization as the most widely used contraceptive method in India. The study is based on the case of the city of Bhuj, in the state of Gujarat (India), where three anthropological fieldworks (15 months) were conducted. Modern contraceptive methods are based on a biomedical representation of the body, drawn from Western categories of knowledge and experience, whereas women live the ‘fleshed’ reproductive body through local categories of substance and fluids. How is this knowledge mobilized and affected in relation to reproductive technologies and the government of reproduction? This question is addressed through the analysis of women's embodied experiences of contraception. The narratives collected show a resistance to biomedicine, considered to be a model that alters the female body and its reproductive capacity. Nevertheless, even when sterilization was considered to be a deliberate act of tampering with the functioning of their bodies, women displayed a pragmatic agency in choosing this method. The experiences of respondents reflected complex negotiations between bodily suffering, socio-economic structures and the microphysics of power surrounding them, rather than a unilateral submission to medical authority and reproductive governance.

Here we provide a short reflection on the persistent themes from the volume and relate it to wider reproductive studies.

Prenatal comes from the Latin words ‘prae’ and ‘natalis’ meaning ‘before’ and ‘to be born’, respectively (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1995). This word is semiotically loaded because ‘prenatal’ connotes the time before being born. The word itself signifies the foetus (who is ‘before being born’) not the pregnant body within whom the foetus grows. If medical experts working within the discipline of reproductive medicine concentrate more on the foetus and its health than the pregnant woman, they take this meaning to heart. Experts argue that ‘a multidisciplinary approach to the foetus is essential part of antenatal screening’ (Malone, 1996, p. 157), a view suggesting that the foetus, more than a pregnant woman, is the physician's main focus during the prenatal period.

This paper analyzes how an infertile body is shaped by social discourses and reproductive technologies. Reproductive governances are articulated in this context by ideas and social values regarding family and motherhood, the binomial of infertility-TRA, legislation and norms and health professionals' practices. In addition, it shows how diverse infertile bodies experience (and withstand) these reproductive governances. Various sources have been consulted, including newspapers, biographical books, bibliographic sources from specialized literature and interviews carried out by the author.