Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: For Sigrid Vertommen, this work was supported by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research: (FWO, grant no. 1207320N) at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University, H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (grant no. 704261) at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London; Wellcome Trust (grant no. 100606) at the Department of Sociology in Cambridge University. For Vincenzo Pavone, this work has been supported by the National Research Project: Bioarreme (2011-2015), grant no. CSO2011-26019, financed by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation. For Michal Nahman, this work was supported by the WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research and by the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol.Peer reviewe