ABSTRACT
Until early 2022, within the global fertility industry, Ukraine was one of the most important destinations for reproductive travel worldwide, particularly specializing in gestational surrogacy for international intended parents. Already weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, the surrogacy market, and here especially surrogates and intended parents, was strongly affected by the Russian invasion in February 2022. In this article, I discuss and analyze the reproductive entanglements of surrogates, intended parents, and the children born through such transnational surrogacy arrangements in Ukraine and how this extreme crisis of war exposed and exacerbated existing vulnerabilities.
ABSTRACT
In the last few decades, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have become increasingly transregional and transnational, often involving travel within or between countries or even continents. Until recently, the global ART industry was marked by so-called 'reprohubs'-places (such as southern California, Dubai, Anand, and Mumbai) specializing in the provision of reproductive services. While reprohubs continue to exist, in the last few years, many have splayed out, transforming into something more akin to webs that encompass, but go beyond these hubs. These webs show a unique dynamic capability to tighten, entangle, or extend in reaction to local and global changes, a characteristic which became particularly obvious during the global Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper, we propose conceptualizing this new dynamic capability as 'reprowebs'-an approach that adds a new dimension to the existing conceptualization of reproductive travel and helps us to better understand current developments in the global ART industry.