Global reproductive landscapes and with them cross-border routes are rapidly changing. This paper examines the reproductive routes and choices of fertility travellers from China to Russia as reported by medical professionals and fertility service providers. Providing new empirical data, it raises new ethical questions on the facilitation of cross-border reproductive travel and the commercialisation of reproductive treatment. The relaxation of the one-child policy in 2014 in China, the increasing demand for ART exceeding the capacity of national fertility clinics and the (...) difficulty of accessing treatment with donor eggs concomitant with a growing economic power of the upper–middle class are shaping the ART industry in Asia in new ways. A new development is Chinese citizens increasingly seeking ART treatment in Russia, which has a long-standing practice of ART governed by a liberal legislation. Furthermore, as China prohibits the export of gametes, Chinese fertility travellers rely on acquiring donor gametes once starting treatment abroad. Clinicians in Russia report three strategies amongst their Chinese patients: One group is using donor eggs of women of Asian appearance living in Russia or is hiring women of resembling appearance from third-party countries to donate their eggs in Russia to create resemblance in their offspring. Another group is buying white donor gametes to create Eurasian mixed children and thus ‘enhance’ their offspring. Providing novel empirical data, this article informs ethical deliberation and raises imminent questions for further research in this understudied geographic region and on cross-border reproductive treatment. (shrink)

This article utilises feminist technoscience studies’ notions of bodily ‘materialisation’ and ‘ontological choreographies’, offering a cyborg feminist account of ‘bioavailability’ as embodied becomings, rather than a fixed ontological state of being. Drawn from 2 years’ ethnographic study in in vitro fertilisation clinics in Spain with migrant women who provided eggs to the cross-border in vitro fertilisation industry, this work explores how global understandings of race and inequalities, clinical practices and women’s own emotional and physical labours collectively produce bioavailability. Through examples (...) from observations and interviews in in vitro fertilisation clinics, we examined women’s embodied stories to understand the ways in which bioavailability becomes. The article demonstrates a novel way in which to think about ‘bioavailability’, a concept which has already been of enormous use to the social sciences since its introduction by Lawrence Cohen. We examine recent configurations of bodily extraction in the reproduction–migration nexus that help us rethink the concept of bioavailability. (shrink)