Speculative Fertilities: Finance, Pharma, and the Future of Reproduction

The Speculative Fertilities project aims to transform the social study of reproduction by analysing the intersection of the financial and fertility sectors as a key site of reproductive politics. The fertility sector is increasingly reshaped by global finance capital, which drives the transformation of independent clinics into transnational groups, while introducing new logics, metrics and infrastructures to its professionals. What is at stake in this financialisation of fertility is more than funding alone; it also introduces interpretative frames through which fertility practices may be understood and managed, shifts the power relations within the sector and selectively drives reproinnovation projects that align with the logics of speculative finance. Using qualitative methods, this study will analyse three case studies that may transform the future of reproduction, including automated IVF, in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) and mifepristone (abortion pill) as contraception. By analysing these three complementary case studies of (non)reproductive innovations, this project will examine the new material realities and ideological shifts emerging with the financialisation of fertility that position specific new technologies as the promise of speculative reproductive futures. In other words, this project approaches finance as itself a reproductive technology that propels certain visions of fertility into the future, while disenabling others.