Tracking the routes of routinization that sperm banking has followed in China has required showing how it came to be (1) socio-historically (re-)produced and entrenched within China’s restrictive reproductive complex; (2) an established and habituated part of health delivery, which is to say a standard of care for a given condition that is sustained in a fixed setting through routinized, daily practices; and (3) a normalized part of daily life, in the sense that it is made available to and is accepted and used by its (un)intended users in a routine, commonplace manner. The core argument of this book has been that it is through such routinization that practice collectives emerge and particular styles of sperm banking take form, characterized by mass mobilizations, assembly line laboratory shifts, the managing of large groups of donors, and the maintaining of strict anonymity and confidentiality. Practice collectives are post-translation, emerging as they do out of the “roll out” and, in China’s case, the mass scaling up of particular medical technologies.
Facilitators and obstacles to sperm banking in young men receiving gonadotoxic chemotherapy for cancer: the perspective of survivors and health care professionals