Selective reproduction in Asia – selecting sons, promoting quality

International conference on selective reproductive technologies, 13-15 December 2012

Reproductive policies, technologies and practices in Asia (the world’s most populous continent with 4.2 billion people), have long been the focus of local, national and international scrutiny, if not controversy. In December 2012, an international conference on selective reproductive technologies took place at the University of Copenhagen with an important focus on Asia. Selective reproductive technologies are built up around increasingly sophisticated technical possibilities to selectively fertilise gametes, implant embryos and/or abort foetuses. They are explicitly used to prevent or promote the birth of certain ‘kinds of children’ (e.g. a child suffering from ‘serious disease’, a healthy child, an intelligent child, a male child, a saviour sibling).

In Asian countries, selective reproduction is perhaps most notably associated with sex selection as male-female ratios in countries like China, India and Vietnam become ever more skewed, not least as ultrasound scanning technologies have become widely available. At the same time, as techniques for prenatal screening and genetic diagnosis become routinised throughout different parts of Asia, selective reproductive technologies have also become bound up in couples’ quests for ‘quality offspring’, not to mention governments’ aims to improve ‘population quality’.

While the conference – Selective Reproductive Technologies: Routes of Routinisation and Globalisation – was global in scope, there was a specific focus on Asia when keynote speaker and anthropologist Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner (University of Sussex) gave a talk on the topic of “Community- and State Intervention in Reproductive Decision-Making in Asia”. There was also paper presentations covering prenatal screening, transnational surrogacy as well as sperm donor selection in India, China, Vietnam and Cambodia. Speakers were addressing mundane, everyday aspects of these technologies as they are taken up, developed, expanded and resisted in different socio-economic, cultural and medical settings.

For more information about registration and to see the programme, visit the conference website. Conference convenors were Asian Dynamics Initiative Research Fellow Ayo Wahlberg and Associate Professor Tine Gammeltoft, Department of Anthropology. The conference were a collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies, University of Copenhagen, and is funded through the Sapere Aude programme of the Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF).