Projects:
- “Towards an Inclusive Reproduction and Parenthood despite COVID-19”
The number of people seeking to reproduce using Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) is rising both globally and in Europe and yet, the regulation of access to particular ART procedures in different European states differs greatly and thus gives rise to cross border fertility travel. Achieving pregnancy via ARTs is not enough, further challenges arise in obtaining legal parenthood and citizenship status. The project entitled ‘Towards an Inclusive Reproduction and Parenthood despite COVID-19’ builds on previous EU funded research, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA) Fellowship ‘QTReproART’. Both studies depart from the premise that an adverse consequence of reproductive technologies is that access to ART and obtaining legal parenthood and citizenship is unevenly distributed among different parts of the population. Especially now during the Covid-19 challenges and obstacles in reproduction and parenthood for queer and trans people are intensified.
I gave a flash talk about this project during a Cambridge Reproduction Conference (online) in Nov. 2021.
- “Reproductive Ethics: Disability and Queer-Feminist Justice”
The second bigger and overarching project encompassing all my projects on reproduction is an ethics of reproduction. I began working on this topic when I was a visiting researcher at UC Berkeley (2013-17) as part of the Beatrice Bain Research Group in the Department for Gender and Women’s Studies and at the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society working on a project with the title Reproductive Ethics: Disability and Queer-Feminist Justice. The first part is an applied ethics on new reproductive technologies concerning the normative and non-normative aspects of these technologies and how negative aspects such as a new form of eugenics, biocapitalism, biocolonialism, bioprecarity and stratified reproduction could be avoided and a form of reproductive justice achieved. The second part is a meta-ethics about reproduction analysing key concepts in the context of reproduction such as justice, recognition (intersectionalities), interdependence, capabilities, and transformative ethos.
