Date: March 12, 2020
Venue: Mackintosh-Corry Hall, D214
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Speaker: Bronwyn Parry, King’s College London
The global use of Assistive Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) to address structural infertility has burgeoned since the early 2000s, with India a prime location for service delivery. The scale of expansion has resulted in a proliferation of non-standard and unethical practices that have, perversely, lead to increases in patient infertility. Senior Indian reproductive specialists seek to generate their own ‘reproductive empires’ by further expanding service provision into emerging markets such as Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. This talk explores these new empires and their political and economic drivers: the neoliberalism of health service provision in India; the privatisation and corporatisation of care; gendered competitiveness; and cultural preferences for biologically related children.
Bronwyn Parry, King’s College London
Bronwyn Parry is Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine and Head of the School of Global Affairs at Kings College London. Bronwyn is interested in the social, ethical and legal implications of transforming human tissues and DNA into bio-information that can be circulated across multiple platforms and into multiple markets simultaneously. Her books Trading the Genome: Investigating the Commodification of Bio-information (2004) and Bio-Information (2017) investigate the emergence of new global economies in bioinformation, revealing how tissue samples and DNA segue into and out of the commodity form at different moments and places in their careers.