Expanding Markets in Life: Exploring emerging ART practices in India and Uganda

This project takes the 2020 Indian Surrogacy Regulation Bill as a starting point for exploring how the reproductive industry adapts and relocates to unregulated East African markets.

India is now increasingly seen as a “pre-conception assemblage hub”, where embryos are created and implanted into surrogates who carry their pregnancies to term in countries with no protective legislation.

The study will focus on surrogacy and the related practices of oocyte donation and breast milk provision, and linkages between India and the emerging fertility markets in East Africa, with a particular focus on Uganda.

Feminist theories of work, political economy and social reproduction theory constitute the theoretical framing of the project, operationalised through mixed qualitative methods in Gujarat and Kampala. The key aim is to provide new knowledge on emerging gendered forms of labour in a rapidly expanding global bio-economy.

By analyzing how the current legal landscape in India creates new transnational economies of exploitation, impacting some of the world’s most vulnerable populations, our study offers valuable insights into the mechanisms and implications of technological diffusion, not the least in relation to global inequalities.

But the relevance of the project is even broader, given the central role of female reproductive tissues and processes in biotechnologies, which drives the expanding global markets in bodies and body parts.