Dr Yvonne Frankfurth

Dr Yvonne Frankfurth is a sociologist of reproduction, technology, and the state. She now teaches and supervises in these areas in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge.

Yvonne’s research focuses on the governance of reproduction across law, cross-border reproductive care, and emerging technologies, including AI- and data-driven platforms used in embryo selection and gamete donor matching. She is interested in how reproductive governance organises inequality, embeds assumptions about gender, race, and national identity, and relocates moral responsibility onto individuals under conditions that are structurally produced yet often difficult to perceive. Her research focuses on Germany, Europe, and the United States. Methodologically, she combines multi-sited qualitative fieldwork, in-depth interviews, legal and policy analysis, and digital ethnography.

Her current monograph project, The Nation in the Embryo: Reproductive Law, Transnational Practice, and Algorithmic Futures, examines how reproductive prohibition does not eliminate contested practices, but instead displaces them across borders and governs their aftermath through legal uncertainty, ethical labour, and technical systems of ranking and selection. It argues that reproduction is a key site through which contemporary states defend moral order, distribute responsibility, and sort legitimate futures.

Yvonne completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge as an ESRC scholar in the ReproSoc group under the supervision of Professor Sarah Franklin. During her PhD, she spent time at Yale University as a Visiting PhD Student and Visiting Assistant in Research in Sociology, where she collaborated with scholars across Science and Technology Studies and Law. After completing her doctorate, she worked as an HP Lecturer and Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London.

She holds a BA (Hons) in Politics, Psychology, and Sociology with First Class honours, and an MPhil with Distinction, both from the University of Cambridge. She received bursary and scholarship support for her studies from the Cambridge European Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

Selected public engagement
Her research contributes to wider public and policy debates on reproductive law, donor conception, and the future of fertility care. Her work has informed public discussion through interviews and broadcast contributions including Deutsche Welle, WDR Quarks Daily, WELT, Die Zeit, ARD, and radioeins. She is also the founder of the German Donor Conception Network and is currently developing a documentary project on cross-border fertility care.

Teaching
Yvonne has taught undergraduate and postgraduate students across a range of courses in sociology and related fields, including at Cambridge, King’s College London, Harvard, and Boston University. Her teaching has included lecturing, seminars, assessment, and guest lectures. It spans social theory, health and medicine, bioethics, science and technology studies, gender, feminist theory, race and ethnicity studies, the sociology of reproduction, global health and ethics, and qualitative and ethnographic methods.
________________________________________

Selected Publications

Frankfurth, Yvonne. (2021). “Navigating Anonymity and Openness: Germans Travelling Abroad for Egg Donation.” In K. Beier, C. Brügge, P. Thorn, & C. Wiesemann (Eds.), Familienbildung mit Hilfe Dritter [Making Families with Assisted Reproductive Technologies]. Springer Medizin.

Frankfurth, Yvonne. (2017). “Mothers, Morality and Abortion: The Politics of Reproduction in the Formation of the German Nation.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, 18(3), 51–65.

Frankfurth, Yvonne. The Nation in the Embryo: Reproductive Law, Transnational Practice, and Algorithmic Futures. In preparation.

Frankfurth, Yvonne. “Calibrated Futures: AI, Reproductive Governance, and the Politics of Life Before It Begins.”

Frankfurth, Yvonne. “Symbolic Repair: Egg Donation and the Governance of Divided Maternity.”

Frankfurth, Yvonne. “Biolegal Purification: Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis and the Limits of Legislative Permissibility in Germany.”

Frankfurth, Yvonne. “Ethical Labour: Delegated Governance and the Moral Burden of Cross-Border Fertility Care.”

Frankfurth, Yvonne, and Alya Guseva. “Age as a Moral Technology: Stratified Late Motherhood in Global Reproductive Markets.” Paper submitted for presentation at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Medical Sociology Section, New York, August 2026.