What is it about?
The article examines how sperm banking and artificial insemination with donor sperm have emerged as reproductive technologies in China, at a time where concerns are being raised about the impact of massive pollution om sperm quality and infertility rates. Based on ethnographic research in China's largest and oldest sperm bank in Changsha, Hunan province as well as a reading of epidemiological and andrology research studies focused on male infertility in China, the article shows how sperm bank administrators aim to collect relatively less pollution exposed sperm from so-called 'high quality' students found on University campuses.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The article helps to explain how reproductive technologies aimed at helping couples have babies could be developed in China at the same time that the world's most restrictive family planning programme was being enforced.
Perspectives
Concerns about the effects of air, soil and water pollution as well as food contamination abound in China today, the side effects of voracious economic growth. After more than 30 years of restricting reproduction, China is now faced with the opposite problem: China needs babies. My research shows how fertility clinics and sperm banks are now poised to supersede abortion clinics as one of the most important family planning institutions in China.
Ayo Wahlberg
University of Copenhagen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Exposed Biologies and the Banking of Reproductive Vitality in China, Science Technology and Society, April 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0971721818762895.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
