Perverse Markets: How the expanding ART bioeconomy in India contributes to the infertility-burden.

• In Event: Bioeconomies - Life, Technologies, and Capital in the 21st Century II: The Reproductive Bioeconomy

Abstract

ARTs, a leading driver of the global bioeconomy networks have significantly re-ordered relations between the body, labour and the market. In this paper which draws on four years of empirical research we examine the emergent political-economy of this sector in India. When ART here began to evolve into a commercial market the poor lingered at its periphery, offering, most commonly, their wombs on rent or ova for sale. Infertility in India is, however, a profound social impediment, its cultural stigma leaving few unmarked. Seduced by the ‘promise’ of these ‘salvationary’ technologies, the poor have become a new class of consumers for a market seeking to expand beyond its existing and affluent consumer base. Mobilising tropes of ‘reproductive inclusivity’ ART clinics have since mushroomed across India’s rural landscape. Here we map the extent of this market expansion before critically examining how prototype rural ART clinic disorder inclusivity by generating ill-informed and incorrect decision-making, sabotaging patient rights, adding to the financial burden of such families whilst, perversely (re) producing infertility itself. Paradoxically; even as India invokes sweeping new ART legislations these clinics and their practices remain unregulated, hiding in plain sight. While the State obsesses about protecting commercial surrogates it barely registers the violations that such clinics routinely visit upon impoverished infertile couples. Over-protection of ‘the poor’ subject when she provides commercial reproductive labour for ART and nonchalance towards her when she becomes a consumer of the same technology points to the deeper contradictions and ethical entanglements that characterise this emergent bioeconomy.

Authors

• Bronwyn Parry, King's College London

• Rakhi Ghoshal, Unitedworld School of Law