Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China - Hardcover

Wahlberg, Ayo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520297776 ISBN 13: 9780520297777

Verlag: University of California Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China's pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China's twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China's twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national 'sperm crisis' (jingzi weiji).

Good Quality explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China's restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is coeditor of Selective Reproduction in the Twenty-First Century and Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"The scholarship in this book is superior. Ayo Wahlberg has devoted thousands of hours in the field to collecting and analyzing this fascinating data. His refusal to take up the often-belabored globalization framework for understanding reproductive technologies in China is truly provocative." —Liberty Barnes, author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity

"Ayo Wahlberg offers a fascinating analysis of sperm banking in China, situated in the political history of China’s restrictive reproductive policies. A must-read for scholars of medicine and anyone interested in reproductive technologies.” —Rene Almeling, author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm

Aus dem Klappentext

"The scholarship in this book is superior. Ayo Wahlberg has devoted thousands of hours in the field to collecting and analyzing this fascinating data. His refusal to take up the often-belabored globalization framework for understanding reproductive technologies in China is truly provocative." &;Liberty Barnes, author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity

"Ayo Wahlberg offers a fascinating analysis of sperm banking in China, situated in the political history of China&;s restrictive reproductive policies. A must-read for scholars of medicine and anyone interested in reproductive technologies.&; &;Rene Almeling, author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Good Quality

The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China

By Ayo Wahlberg

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2018 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-29777-7

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
List of Abbreviations, 
Introduction: Sperm Crisis, 
1. The Birth of Assisted Reproductive Technology in China, 
2. Improving Population Quality, 
3. Exposed Biologies, 
4. Mobilizing Sperm Donors, 
5. Making Quality Auditable, 
6. Borrowing Sperm, 
Conclusion: Routinization, 
Coda, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Birth of Assisted Reproductive Technology in China

It's about 1978, and the first IVF baby was born in the United Kingdom, but during that time, you know, China had had ten years of Cultural Revolution, so we didn't hear any news from foreign countries and we couldn't read any materials from foreign countries. So during that time, we didn't know this great news until 1979, when my father was able to read some newspapers and magazines from foreign countries. That way he learned that a test-tube baby was born in the U.K. in 1978. So he thought that in China, because of the Qing dynasty Chinese people have suffered a lot not only from the war, but also from drugs, because some of them became addicted to drugs. He said that if you want to change the whole country, you must have a healthy body, so it is also important to have a healthy baby for every Chinese family. At that time, my team was doing prenatal diagnosis for genetic diseases and we found many couples with such diseases, but they could only choose to do an abortion; this was the only option for them. My father thought that maybe if we can find a good way to have a sperm and oocyte cultured in vitro, then we can identify not-good genes and choose the good ones. So his first thought for doing IVF technology was not for infertile couples, but for couples with genetic diseases. But this was a long way off and we also found that it was not easy to do this work. After all our research we decided, then, to also do the treatment for infertile couples. (Lu Guangxiu)

There is an almost precise coincidence of timing in the births of Louise Brown in July 1978 and China's restrictive family planning policy a few months after in 1979. These two landmark events stand at odds with each other in many ways. For Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe, the two doctors who helped Lesley and John Brown give birth to Louise using the technique of in vitro fertilization (IVF), infertility was the problem that needed to be overcome. In contrast, for systems engineer Song Jian, mathematician Li Guangyuan, and other architects of the so-called "one-child-policy," fertility was the problem that needed to be addressed (Greenhalgh, 2008). The technique of IVF alone has brought an estimated 5 million babies into the world globally (in China, some 200,000), while it is said that the one-child policy has prevented some 140 million births in China.

It is worth remembering that, as Martin Johnson and colleagues (2010; see also Johnson, 2011) have shown, Edwards and Steptoe faced numerous setbacks during the early days of their research on IVF in the United Kingdom. They were refused funding by the Medical Research Council in the early 1970s in a scientific climate where research into infertility "was accorded a low priority" (Johnson et al., 2010, p. 2158) when compared to contraception and abortion. Similarly, beginning in the early 1980s, reproductive scientists Lu Guangxiu, Zhang Lizhu, and He Cuihua also faced many setbacks (albeit eventually securing government funding for their research in 1986) in a country where concerns about overpopulation were immediately national rather than global.

What, then, were the conditions that allowed assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to be developed in China during the exact same period that one of the world's most comprehensive family planning policies aimed at preventing birth was being rolled out? First of all, in what follows, we will see how ARTs would have be molded into a suitable form to fit within China's restrictive reproductive complex before they could gain formal authorization through national law as late as 2003. In doing so, these technologies eventually settled alongside contraception, sterilization, and abortion as just another technology of birth control. This might seem counterintuitive, seeing as birth control is most often defined as fertile couples' active efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancies as a matter of (in China, state-stipulated) family planning. Nonetheless, as we will see, for ARTs to be legalized, infertile couples would have to be subject to the same kinds of family planning restrictions as fertile couples. We can say that for increasing numbers of infertile couples in China, birth control can be defined as an active effort to achieve wanted pregnancies using ARTs in order to have one child in strict accordance with family planning policies. Moreover, since China's reproductive complex came to be configured around the dual objectives of controlling population growth and improving population quality, the medical genetic potentials of reproductive technologies were actively mobilized from the outset in China, as highlighted by Lu Guangxiu in this chapter's opening quotation.

Secondly, I will show how even if ARTs such as sperm banking or IVF were invented in the United States and United Kingdom, this did not relieve scientists of a need for experimentation in China, and hence we should not view their development and routinization as an "importation of Western reproductive technologies" (Handwerker, 2002, p. 310; cf. Inhorn, 2003). Instead, we need to trace the transformation of such technologies from pioneering to mundane within China (rather than across borders). By tracing the ways in which ARTs came to be accepted in China we gain insights into the particular form — what we might think of as "one-child ART" — they have taken (cf. Knecht, Beck, and Klotz, 2012).

I begin by looking at how two of the pioneers of reproductive science in China — Lu Guangxiu in Changsha and Zhang Lizhu in Beijing — began experimenting with assisted reproduction, eventually embarking on a collegial yet competitive race to achieve the country's first test tube baby, culminating in the birth of Zheng Mengzu in March 1988 in Beijing, closely followed by a baby girl in Changhsa three months later. Their recollections, recorded in interviews, are interwoven to capture a sense of the pioneering spirit that carried their efforts forward. I will use Zhang and Lu as narrators of the story of the difficult birth of ARTs in China. As we will see, there is a certain style to nostalgic remembering when legacies have already been consolidated, allowing for playful self-deprecation as a means of emphasizing the hurdles and challenges that had to be overcome. Zhang and Lu's personal recollections are balanced against additional interviews with some of the other scientists as well as Ministry of Health officials who were active in reproductive research and policy through the 1980s and 1990s; participation in a series of workshops and conferences on assisted reproduction in China held in Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha, which gave insights into the history of ART in these cities; as well as on secondary archival sources. Accounting for the birth and routinization of sperm banking in China requires accounting for the development of IVF...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520297776
• ISBN 13: 9780520297777
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 246
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland