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, Saving Embryos: Politics of Life After Cryopreservation, 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 work on the practice of embryo adoption.
In February 2018, I participated in the Wenner-Gren Foundation workshop “Interrogating the Intersections of Race and Reproduction in Medicine, Science, and Technology" where I shared work based on ethnographic research within Christian embryo adoption programs. I prepared the article "Race and Personhood in US Embryo Adoption" (currently in revision) for a special journal issue on race and reproduction. It examines how embryo adoption professionals and participants confer ethnicity to frozen embryos and foster racial imaginaries about future children, which I suggest implicate essentialist notions of race in the promotion of embryo personhood.
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.
In February 2018, I participated in the Wenner-Gren Foundation workshop “Interrogating the Intersections of Race and Reproduction in Medicine, Science, and Technology" where I shared work based on ethnographic research within Christian embryo adoption programs. I prepared the article "Race and Personhood in US Embryo Adoption" (currently in revision) for a special journal issue on race and reproduction. It examines how embryo adoption professionals and participants confer ethnicity to frozen embryos and foster racial imaginaries about future children, which I suggest implicate essentialist notions of race in the promotion of embryo personhood.
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.