Abstract
Although reproductive technologies are often sold as ways for individuals to take control of their future and guard against precarity, the proliferation of the idea of the “tech fix” can strengthen systems that are making our communities less secure in the first place. This essay thus explores the tension between technologies offered to us as individuals to address our problems and the negative consequences of leaning too heavily on technologies to address or mitigate what are, essentially, structural problems. I argue that the way that emerging reproductive technologies are being developed and sold threatens to intensify individualism, break solidarity, and increase the wealth and power of investors. In doing so, this essay reviews existing literature on reproductive technology, focusing on scholarship that offers critical insights for understanding the myriad technological and political changes in human reproduction on the horizon. The essay covers topics including financialization, stratified reproduction, the transnational reproductive bioeconomy, surveillance, and eugenics to highlight how scholarship has uncovered many problems with the idea of the “tech fix” in the realm of reproduction. The essay also calls for more critical examinations of the politics of reproductive technologies and greater integration of disability justice into reproductive technology scholarship.
Keywords
In October of 2024,
These snippets from recent headlines illuminate some key features of today’s landscape of reproductive technology that will be crucial for scholars to take on and resist in coming years. We are witnessing a host of political, ideological, social, and economic shifts that bear upon the development and implementation of new and emerging reproductive technologies. In addition to the embryo screening mentioned above, researchers are working on, among other things, making gametes from stem cells and creating artificial wombs. At the same time, in the United States, this research is happening against the backdrop of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of
Many reproductive technologies are marketed as ways for individuals to take control of their futures and make their own way. They are often sold as technologies of independence and security. People are told that freezing their eggs can assure long-term fertility in the face of its inevitable decline. They are told that they can sell their eggs or tissue or gestational labor as a way to guard against increasing economic precarity. They can screen embryos to ensure the healthiest baby as a way of seeking security in the face of declining social support for raising children and in the face of the inevitable uncertainty of childbearing. They can use an app to track their fertility and menstrual cycle in an effort to exert greater control over conception. All of these tech fixes, however, threaten to mask our fundamental interdependence. The proliferation of these technologies in this environment can actually weaken our communities and make us more insecure. The technologies may undermine solidarity and fuel the wealth accumulation of the few. While scholars should study how and why people use technologies, the technologies themselves cannot help us tackle the structural causes of poverty, the decline in social welfare, or the rise in infertility.
As ever, it is incumbent that critical scholars pull back the curtain on what may end up being an emerging common sense about the inevitability and utility of new reproductive technologies. We can expect companies and investors to continue to sell the public developing technologies as empowering and freedom-enhancing, regardless of who profits from them and what social hierarchies and injustices they may reinforce. Making sense of technological developments and how they might be implemented requires attending to a host of factors. Among these factors are the global resurgence of eugenic and fascist ideologies (including socially conservative beliefs about the family and gender roles), the rapid pace of technological development, weakened democracies and regulatory mechanisms, (post)colonial extraction and exploitation of people in the Global South, and the increased wealth and power of elite investors resulting from the rise of financialized capitalism.
To move beyond simplistic accounts of new technologies, we will especially need scholarship that attends to the insights of reproductive justice and disability justice, both of which call for interrogation of the social structures that shape and influence choices. As Ross and Solinger (2017) write, “The reproductive justice analyst looks at how economic and social systems harm lives and constrain the options both of individuals and communities” (p. 123). Moreover, new and emerging reproductive biotechnologies must be understood in the context of the long durée of colonization, empire, slavery, and capitalism (Vora 2022). By drawing on these rich theoretical frameworks, scholarship can show us the structures that underpin reproductive technologies, the powers that are served by their proliferation, and how individuals navigate and understand new technologies. Of particular importance at this moment is work that combines the insights of disability justice and reproductive justice to interrogate the rise of far-right ideologies and changes in political economy while also placing these developments in historical context.
Luckily, existing scholarship on reproductive technology is rich, interdisciplinary, and multi-faceted. It provides a wealth of critical insights for new research to build upon. Below, I briefly comment on trends and strengths within existing scholarship, focusing on those I think will be most critical to draw upon as we study the myriad technological and political changes in human reproduction on the horizon. I am a scholar of U.S. reproductive technology and politics. My review reflects my expertise, although I attend to some of the global trends and particularities of the transnational reproductive bioeconomy and reproductive technology in the Global South. This context is crucial, and there are scholars doing important work in these areas (Pande 2014; Rudrappa 2015; Schurr 2017). Throughout, I emphasize the tension between the technologies offered to us as individuals to address our problems and the negative consequences of leaning too heavily on technologies to address or mitigate what are, essentially, structural problems. The essay concludes with a call to center the disability justice concept of
Financialization and the Tech Fix
The reproductive biotechnology sector is growing, with promises of radically changing the technoscience of reproduction and substantial investments from private investors. Between 2019 and 2022, private investment in fertility startups more than doubled in the United States (Landi 2022). One forecast predicts that the global fertility market will increase to $71.24 billion by 2033, up from $31.49 billion in 2023 (Precedence Research 2024). 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 (Octopus Ventures n.d.).
One of the important trends in recent scholarship is increased attention to the role of political economy and financialization in the development and implementation of reproductive technologies such as those above. My own work has emphasized the role of private investors in shaping which technologies are developed and how they are implemented (Denbow 2024; Denbow and Spira 2023). Neoliberal deregulation of the financial sector underpinned the rise in wealth and power of private investors. Failing to account for how investors and deregulation shape reproductive technologies risks making these technologies seem inevitable, thereby depoliticizing them. It is crucial to combat this notion of inevitability. As Ruha Benjamin (2024) has written about artificial intelligence “tech evangelists,” inevitability is part of their spiritual ethos—“their own version of predestination.” This view encourages the public to passively accept whatever the tech gods and their investors decide we should want or need.
That is why work that uncovers the politics, logic, implications, and investments of reproductive biotechnologies and health services is crucial. Researchers have published important work on the impact of private equity acquisitions of fertility clinics and investments on women’s health (Bruch et al. 2020) and fertility management (Perrotta 2024). Almeling (2011) has examined the gendered dynamics of the market in gametes, while van de Wiel’s (2020) work has unraveled the role of private investment in the growth of egg freezing as well as the use of debt financing for fertility treatments. This “financialization of fertility” has deep implications for how individuals navigate reproductive decisions and understand fertility. In neoliberal fashion, egg freezing encourages individuals to take charge of, and invest in, their reproductive future through a technological fix (Rottenberg 2018). This is also happening alongside structural racial inequities and obstetric racism and violence that cannot be solved with more technological innovation (Davis 2019).
Importantly, the rise in infertility, and thus the need for a tech fix, is a structural issue. As scholars examine Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs), it is crucial to push back against the notion that infertility is an individual problem resulting from a flaw in the body. Instead, the concept of structural infertility calls researchers to ask about the structural political and economic origins of the rise in infertility. As Briggs (2017:111) argues in the context of the United States, “ARTs are how people are coping with the structural infertility of the long period of education and economic insecurity that is the price of the ticket these days to the middle class but that virtually requires delayed childbearing.” In addition, environmental toxins and pollutants cause reproductive health concerns, including infertility. An approach that links reproductive justice to environmental justice is necessary to combat the systemic causes of environmental toxins to which communities of color are disproportionately exposed (Bridges 2022; Lappé, Hein, and Landecker 2019).
While it is imperative that scholars analyze and critique the forces that underpin technological development and implementation, technologies should not be dismissed out of hand. ART has now been around for decades and has been pivotal in enabling people who otherwise would not have been able to reproduce to have children. Fertility clinics are necessary for those with fertility issues as well as queer and single people who use their services to procreate. People of color are using ART at increasing rates, and scholars must attend to this fact (Mutcherson 2013). At this moment in which legal protection of in vitro fertilization (IVF) is under attack in the United States, scholars should also emphasize that access to IVF is a feminist issue (Kimball 2019). With the U.S. Supreme Court’s revocation of the Constitutional right to abortion and, with it, the proliferation of state fetal personhood laws, the legal and regulatory landscape of IVF is uncertain. In 2023, Congressional Republicans introduced the “Life at Conception Act,” which would declare an embryo a human being from “the moment of fertilization,” thus endangering IVF.
While attending to the importance of access to ARTs for some folks, scholars should also analyze the ways in which the rise in infertility is a structural issue and resist the notion that new technology can ever be the solution to this, or any other, systemic problem. As currently structured and sold, many reproductive biotechnologies threaten to increase the power and wealth of elite investors and tend to provide an individualized response to what is a collective, political problem.
Global Fertility Chains
In addition to the critical attention on capitalism and financialization that much of the above work centers, ARTs must also be understood in the context of race, empire, and colonialism. Weinbaum (2019) analyzes ART through the lens of the “slave episteme” to focus on the contemporary racialization of reproductive labor, whereas Russell’s (2018) work centers race in her examination of ARTs as technologies of kinship. There is also an abundance of excellent scholarship on ART and surrogacy that examines the racial and colonial logics of reproductive technology markets in a range of global locations (Vertommen 2024; Vora 2015).
In an effort to integrate the topics of political economy, the devaluation of gendered reproductive labor, and the ongoing colonial dynamics of uneven global development, Vertommen, Pavone, and Nahman (2022) have introduced the concept of
Much of the work discussed above on transnational surrogacy analyzes the dynamics of reproductive “tourism”—or, perhaps more accurately, reproductive outsourcing—whereby prospective parents from wealthy countries travel abroad to hire surrogates in places with lax regulations on the practice and where they can hire surrogates for less money than in their home country. This research will be important to draw upon as new technologies emerge and different countries have different regulations of them. For example, no country currently explicitly allows for the use of heritable human genome editing—which would involve using a gene editing technology like CRISPR to modify embryos that, as adults, would pass on a genetically modified genome to any offspring (Baylis et al. 2020). However, were some countries to allow heritable human genome editing, it would likely lead to a new kind of reproductive science “tourism” (Baylis 2024). Such a development would likely intensify existing inequalities and lead to a situation where wealthy individuals travel to countries with lax regulations to use heritable genome editing, with global ramifications for the human genome (Mukherjee and Shirinian 2022).
Technologies of Surveillance and Wealth Accumulation
In addition to uncertainty about IVF, since the overturning of
Commentators have also raised alarms about the possibility of data from period tracking apps and search engine history being used for criminal prosecutions in a post-
The myriad fertility and health care apps that are now on the market should also be understood as technologies of surveillance that have a particular political economy and political implications (Ford, De Togni, and Miller 2021; Gilman 2021). No doubt these technologies will be employed and understood in different ways in different contexts. Grappling with their diverse implications will require attention to localized histories of technology, surveillance, and population control (Balasubramanian 2018). In the United States, such apps are yet another example of investors and companies marketing technology as a way for individuals to take control of their future. Yet these technologies ultimately make us more vulnerable. Not only may fertility apps come to play a role in criminal prosecutions, but in using technologies of self-surveillance, we give up our privacy and data about ourselves to poorly regulated companies that are accumulating evermore capital. The over-investment of resources in tech companies is itself a structural, political economic problem that is only exacerbated every time individuals use their products for self-surveillance.
Beyond the technologies of self-surveillance, the expansion of digital platforms targeted at mothers falls under the broad umbrella of reproductive technology. Digital care work platforms like Care.com, for example, play a crucial role in framing reproductive labor as an opportunity for entrepreneurship (Ticona and Mateescu 2018). To grapple fully with the implications of such technology, we will need critical work that centers digital capitalism to consider questions such as how these platforms turn mothers into users and workers (Martinez and Alzate 2024).
Integrating Disability Justice
The importance of research on reproductive technology could not be higher at this moment. While we still need sharp analyses of more established reproductive technologies, the quick pace of development in the field of reproductive technology means that scholars must contend with new and emerging technologies. As with earlier forms of reproductive technology, we need scholarship that examines the development and implementation of these technologies from multiple levels of analysis. Social science and humanities scholarship must look at how individuals navigate, understand, and develop these technologies. We will need critical inquiries of what happens in the lab, in the clinic, and in people’s homes and communities of care. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of what is happening at the structural level: what politics, policies, economies, and ideologies underpin and inform how technology is being developed and implemented?
The concept and framework of reproductive justice has transformed scholarly research on reproductive technology, and scholars must continue to draw upon it as we tackle the issues above. It is particularly well suited to the task of understanding how structural conditions shape and influence individual choices. Black women activists coined the term reproductive justice in response to racist state violence of involuntary sterilization and welfare state retrenchment. The reproductive justice frame responds to, and uncovers the problems with, an overemphasis on individuals and choice (Luna 2009; Price 2010). In doing so, reproductive justice calls us to protect reproductive decisions all the while fighting for structural changes (Ross and Solinger 2017). Much of the research I cite above interrogates structural injustice, showing us how to understand issues that are sometimes presented as simple questions of individual choice—for example, whether to freeze eggs or serve as a surrogate—as issues of justice. Reproductive justice centers, in the words of Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (2005), “the power inequities inherent in our society’s institutions, environment, economics, and culture.”
Like reproductive justice, the disability justice framework centers structural injustices. Disability justice originated with, and has been developed mostly by, disabled and queer people of color. Rather than locating disability as a problem with an individual, the disability justice framework centers social, political, and economic structures that create barriers to justice.
Disability justice counters the disability rights movement that has historically centered the experiences of relatively privileged people with disabilities, and which utilizes an individual rights framework rather than a structural approach to disability (Sins Invalid 2019). Like reproductive justice, disability justice focuses on interlocking systems of injustice such as ableism, capitalism, and white supremacy (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018). As disability justice activist Berne (2015:5) explains, ableism cannot be understood “without grasping its interrelations with heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism, each system co-creating an ideal bodymind built upon the exclusion and elimination of an subjugated ‘other’ from whom profits and status are extracted.” As such, the disability justice framework “understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met” (Berne 2015:5).
There is a robust literature that examines issues of disability and reproductive technologies such as prenatal screening (Knight and Miller 2023; Ginsburg and Rapp 2024; Parens and Asch 2003; Saxton 2000). However, much of the work on this topic is published in bioethics and has not been well integrated into social science and humanities research on reproductive technologies. For example, literature on IVF does not often adequately grapple with the myriad genetic testing and screening technologies that prospective parents who use IVF must navigate. At the same time, much bioethics literature centered on reproductive technology does not contain deep critiques of capitalism, colonialism, or reproductive labor of the kind I reviewed above. In general, there is too much siloing of people studying reproductive technologies from different fields and disciplines. As with other fields, indisciplinarity and cross-disciplinary citation is critical (Jones 2025).
Although the scholarship reviewed in the sections above is filled with critical insights about reproductive technology, going forward, it is imperative that scholars integrate disability justice frameworks more into their research and analysis. Scholars should also attend to the connections and affinities between reproductive justice and disability justice. Regarding this connection, Ross and Solinger (2017:204) write that “the reproductive justice perspective argues that the disabled person is not the burden, but the lack of social supports absolutely burdens parents who have children with special needs and burdens the children themselves.” That point resonates with what disability justice activist and scholar Russell (1998) wrote concerning the “politics of perfect babies.” She recognized that the absence of public support for raising disabled children and anemic public health care pushed prospective parents into bringing only non-disabled children into the world.
The insights of Russell and other disability justice advocates call us to place capitalism at the center of our analysis of new reproductive technologies. Beyond Russell’s focus on welfare state retrenchment, scholars should also interrogate how the financial sector pushes and profits from technology that could be used for eugenic purposes. New technologies raise crucial political, economic, and social questions. We should follow the insights of those like Obasogie and Darnovsky (2018:9–10), who call for both “democratic oversight of powerful human biotechnologies” and avoidance of “a new market-driven eugenics.”
Guarding Against Precarity Through Interdependency
Reproductive technologies have particular politics. In the current moment, these technologies reflect back to us a broken political system and global injustices. They threaten to exacerbate and intensify what is wrong with our current political moment—and there are many things that are wrong. The way that emerging technologies will be developed and sold threatens to intensify individualism, break solidarity, and increase the wealth and power of investors. In short, they threaten to undermine the things we need to build a democratic future.
In fact, powerful people are actively investing in eugenic technologies and trying to bring about a thoroughly authoritarian future. To return to the Collinses, whose story of paying $50,000 to screen their embryos for intelligence began this essay, their current use of reproductive technology and their vision of the future is deeply eugenic and serves as a cautionary tale. The Collinses have been in the news recently for a proposal for a “fantasy city-state” they made to undercover reporters. Their proposed city-state is a dictatorship in which those with more “utility” have more rights. The Collinses write that their “system recognizes that competence is not evenly distributed among a population,” and they propose punishment for “those who bring citizens into the system that are net drains on resources” (Kirchgaessner and Devlin 2024). These proclamations are of apiece with their goal, as
In this context, tech fixes are sold as ways for individuals to take control of the future in a way that threatens to obfuscate both our interdependence and the political, economic, and structural sources of these problems. Many reproductive technologies may be implemented in a way that contributes to what activist and author Taylor (2023) calls manufactured insecurity. Many of the ways individuals seek to find security today, in the midst of increasing precarity, end up strengthening the very systems that are making us insecure in the first place. To use the example of genetic engineering of embryos, if we seek to find security in using technology to bring only “healthy” or “intelligent” or “normal” children into the world, we are buying into the illusion of the tech fix. In many instances, the use of genetic technologies enriches the very investors who play a role in fomenting anxiety about reproduction and whose exorbitant wealth and political influence is itself the product of systemic political and economic injustices. If we are expected only to bring “normal” or “exceptional” children into the world, then we may be blamed if we fail to do so.
While scholars must attend to these troubling trends, we should also articulate alternatives (Ross and Lucas 2024). The disability justice framework concept of interdependency can be one important resource upon which to draw in countering the extreme individualism and careless disregard for others’ well-being that marks the view of many global elite today. Disability justice advocate Mingus (2010) defines interdependency as “not just me ‘dependent on you’.” Instead, it is “both ‘you and I’ and ‘we’. It is solidarity.” Rather than demonize dependence—a view that both undergirds the Collinses’ fantasy and underpinned the gutting of the welfare state that has fueled precarity—interdependency asks us to see our well-being as bound up with one another. What would the development and implementation of reproductive technology look like in a context in which interdependency and solidarity are our guiding principles? Instead of an individualized focus on the future, we should seek to celebrate and support our interdependency, which entails resisting dehumanization and oppression in all its forms.
