Coda

In February of 2017, I returned to Changsha once again to present a draft of this book. It is always something of a nerve-wracking affair to get feedback from the people whose work you have researched and written about. Much to my relief, and notwithstanding important critiques of the book’s chapters, which have been incorporated into the final draft, staff members at the sperm bank appreciated the account of their work found in ...

Conclusion

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.

Exposed Biologies

Smog-choked cities, cancer villages, and contaminated food have become iconic problems of a modernizing China—the tragic, perhaps unavoidable, side effects of a voracious economy. Chapter 3 examines how the sperm bank—jingziku—in China has emerged quite literally as a sanctuary of vitality amid concerns around food safety, air and water pollution, rising infertility, and declining population quality. As a twist on Margaret Lock’s concept of “local biologies,” the chapter argues that exposed biologies have become a matter of concern in China in ways that have corroborated a place for high-tech sperm banks within China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Exposed biologies are a side effect of modernization processes, as industrially manufactured chemicals are increasingly held culpable for a range of pathologies, from cancers andmetabolic diseases to disorders of sex development and infertility.

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.

Introduction

From crude and uneasy beginnings, sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex within the space of thirty years, albeit hampered by what some commentators have described as a “sperm crisis.” In the introduction, routinization is defined as a socio-historical process through which habituated regimes of daily micro-practices coalesce, thereby shaping a medical technology and its uses. Assemblage ethnography is proposed as a necessary methodology to account for how routinized sperm banking has become possible in China and what style of sperm banking has emerged as a result.

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.

Improving Population Quality

Beyond the treatment of infertility, donor sperm is also made available to couples if the male partner is considered to suffer from a genetic disease and is deemed “not suitable for reproduction” because of a risk that the disease will be transmitted to offspring, thereby negatively affecting the quality of China’s newborn population. There are far fewer cases of donor sperm being used in this way than to address infertility. Chapter 2 shows how artificial insemination by donor both purports to contribute to the improvement of national population quality while, at the same time, introducing a potential threat to this quality in the form of possible unwitting consanguineous marriage of donor siblings. Sperm banking in China is inextricably bound to national family planning objectives to improve the quality of newborns.

Borrowing Sperm

Once it passes quality control, donor sperm is “released” to the thousands of couples who are involuntarily childless because of azoospermia. Chapter 6 shows how for those infertile couples who “borrow” sperm in China, secrecy is as vital as male infertility is taboo. Through fertility clinics, artificial insemination by donor (AID) emerges as an opportunity to achieve a visible pregnancy, a pregnancy that couples are both in pursuit of and expected to deliver by family and friends. The chapter argues that in one-child policy China, recipient couples and donors mobilize strategies of “hearth” management and trouble avoidance as third-party conception has become acceptable for increasing numbers of involuntarily childless couples who are living with male infertility.

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.