Artificial Insemination: An Academic Analysis from the Perspectives of Sharia and Contemporary Medicine

This scholarly article discusses the view of Islamic Sharia law pertaining to artificial insemination. Artificial insemination, as one of the contemporary medical issues, was not in existence in the era of Sharia jurisprudents. It emerged in the last century as a result of scientific and medical developments; as its first successful experience in the field was performed in the UK in 1977 on the birth of a baby girl called Louise Brown. The practice later proliferated in other western countries, even surpassing its legitimate aim of treating infertile couples, as it began to entail businesses such as womb comodification, the establishment of sperm banks, and the like.

Soldiers and superheroes needed! Masculine archetypes and constrained bodily commodification in the sperm donation market

Extant research on bodily commodification emphasizes contexts, where market actors can pursue commodification in relatively unconstrained ways. However, scant research examines how marketers foster bodily commodification in markets, where institutional constraints limit the value which can be extracted, produced and/or exchanged. We fill this gap by studying sperm donation services in the United Kingdom and Australia, where a number of governmental regulations limit bodily commodification and value creation processes. Using an archival analysis of visual and textual material, we find that sperm banks in these constrained contexts strategically rely on the marketing of masculine archetypes as a source of value. This article delineates the concept of constrained bodily commodification and its marketing implications. Moreover, it evidences sociocultural discursive mechanisms by which marketers attempt to overcome constrained commodification issues. Specifically, we emphasize the role of gender archetypes as a resource, which allows sperm banks’ marketers to transfer identity value to the donor and donation experience. Finally, this article also has implications for the theorizing of value creation by expanding our understanding of how value is created during consumer disposition processes.

The Birth of Assisted Reproductive Technology in China

This chapter chronicles the difficult birth of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in China through the 1980s and 1990s, showing how ideas of improving population quality acted as a persuasive alibi for those pioneers working to develop fertility technologies under crude conditions and at a time when contraception rather than conception was at the core of family planning. From difficult beginnings in the 1980s and following legalization in 2003, ARTs have now settled firmly within China’s restrictive reproductive complex as technologies of birth control—which, in turn, has allowed it to grow into a thriving, sector as China is now home to some of the world’s largest fertility clinics and sperm banks.

Mobilizing Sperm Donors

A limit of five women’s pregnancies per donor in China has spawned a cyclic and “high throughput” style of sperm banking, which requires getting great numbers of potential donors to show up at the sperm bank for screening. Chapter 4 argues that it is the relatively unexposed and virile vitality of bioavailable male populations on university campuses that is sought after by sperm banks. In this cyclic tissue economy, sperm banks persistently exhaust the willingness of a given cohort of young men on university campuses only to resume once “fresh” cohorts have arrived. Novel strategies of recruitment have been devised and adjusted to address the chronic shortage of donors in China.

Making Quality Auditable

Donor screening in sperm banks has become increasingly medicalized in the last few decades. Sperm is a vital yet potentially dangerous substance. To improve its quality, sperm banks advise potential donors on how best to prepare themselves prior to donating. To mitigate the dangers it poses, sperm banks screen would-be donors as a way to prevent transmission of genetic and infectious disease from donor to recipient. Chapter 5 argues that practices that take place within the sperm bank’s facilities and laboratories can helpfully be analyzed as technologies of assurance (quebao) as sperm banks manage heredity and purity as matters of transmission while also encouraging cultivation practices aimed at procuring a lively stock of sperm for distribution to fertility centers throughout China.