Embryo 'Adoption'
Image: Two families connected through embryo adoption featured in People Magazine's December 17, 2012 issue: https://people.com/archive/forever-bonded-one-baby-two-families-vol-78-no-25/
Writing
My book project, Ex Utero: Political Lives of Frozen Embryos, draws upon a decade of ethnographic research with Christian embryo adoption proponents and participants in the United States. This will be the first book-length ethnography on the practice of embryo adoption.
The chapter "Waiting: The Redemption of Frozen Embryos through Embryo Adoption and Stem Cell Research" is included in the edited collection Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society published by Berghahn Books in 2017. Read here.
The article entitled "Saving Embryos in Stem Cell Science and Christian Adoption" is included in a December 2018 special issue in New Genetics & Society on ontologies of the living within biobanking. This article examines the saving ethics and practices that govern the repurposing of leftover embryos in the US. Read here.
The article "Making the Ethnic Embryo: Enacting Race in US Embryo Adoption" in Medical Anthropology will be published in a special journal issue on race and reproduction in Summer 2019. Currently online, this article examines how embryo adoption professionals and participants produce ethnicity as inhering in frozen embryos. Read here.
I am preparing an article titled "Rescuing 'Orphan' Embryos" that examines the use of American adoption as a model for the disposition of frozen embryos. Proponents of embryo adoption strive to challenge the commodification of embryos as legal forms of property by regarding them as 'pre-born' children deserving rescue from orphanhood. But American adoption law and practices are deeply imbricated with market forces through which logics of commodification shape the circulation of children. I suggest that using adoption rhetoric of rescue and abandonment to produce embryos as 'orphans' reproduces commodifying logics that embryo advocates seek to undermine. This article foregrounds criticisms of the embryo-as-orphan framework from embryo adoption professionals and participants.
The chapter "Waiting: The Redemption of Frozen Embryos through Embryo Adoption and Stem Cell Research" is included in the edited collection Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society published by Berghahn Books in 2017. Read here.
The article entitled "Saving Embryos in Stem Cell Science and Christian Adoption" is included in a December 2018 special issue in New Genetics & Society on ontologies of the living within biobanking. This article examines the saving ethics and practices that govern the repurposing of leftover embryos in the US. Read here.
The article "Making the Ethnic Embryo: Enacting Race in US Embryo Adoption" in Medical Anthropology will be published in a special journal issue on race and reproduction in Summer 2019. Currently online, this article examines how embryo adoption professionals and participants produce ethnicity as inhering in frozen embryos. Read here.
I am preparing an article titled "Rescuing 'Orphan' Embryos" that examines the use of American adoption as a model for the disposition of frozen embryos. Proponents of embryo adoption strive to challenge the commodification of embryos as legal forms of property by regarding them as 'pre-born' children deserving rescue from orphanhood. But American adoption law and practices are deeply imbricated with market forces through which logics of commodification shape the circulation of children. I suggest that using adoption rhetoric of rescue and abandonment to produce embryos as 'orphans' reproduces commodifying logics that embryo advocates seek to undermine. This article foregrounds criticisms of the embryo-as-orphan framework from embryo adoption professionals and participants.