Ice Age. Entangled Lives, Times, and Ethics in Fertility Preservation
Reproductive medicine had entered a new preservation age. Fertility preservation profoundly ordered reproductive trajectories, boosting the global market in private reproductive cells/tissue banking and assisted reproduction. The project aimed to situate fertility preservation as not merely a technical or reproductive innovation but as a cultural one.
THE PROJECT IS CLOSED
Project period: 2017-2020
Our main research question asked: How is fertility preservation given meaning and value in the lives of individual freezers, in commercial undertakings, in clinical practices, and within bioethics and law?
Because the question demanded a collaborative approach, the research cut across the arenas of bioethics/law, practices/experiences, and culture/commerce. We sought to make a significant academic contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship, developing cultural theories on reproductive time, and enabling scholarly-grounded public policies, debates, and law on preservation.
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Within the arena of Bioethics/Law we asked the following questions:
- RQ1: How do the Danish and international ethical debates on fertility preservation and banking entangle with reproductive autonomy?
- RQ2: What values are embedded within the Danish law on fertility preservation and how does preservation call for new understandings of reproductive rights?
Within the arena of Practices/Experiences we asked the following questions:
- RQ3: How is fertility preservation enacted in the clinical setting in select Danish and U.S. clinics and laboratories?
- RQ4: How do patients, elective freezers, and commissioning parents experience preservation and how does fertility preservation entangle with their life temporalities?
Within the arena of Culture/Commerce we asked the following questions:
- RQ5: What cultural configurations of fertility preservation and temporality appear in popular culture and in the clinical setting?
- RQ6: How are eggs and ovarian tissue, in new commercial undertakings, transformed into frozen assets?
Researchers
- PI Professor Charlotte Kroløkke, University of Southern Denmark
- Professor wsr Janne Rothmar Herrmann, University of Copenhagen
- Professor Thomas Søbirk Petersen, Roskilde University
- Associate Professor Stine Willum Adrian, Aalborg University
Funding
Ice Age. Entangled Lives, Times, and Ethics in Fertility Preservation received a three year funding from Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities.
Project: Ice Age. Entangled Lives, Times, and Ethics in Fertility Preservation.
(Grant number: 7013-00042A)
Period: 2017-2020
Contact
PI Professor WSR
Charlotte Kroløkke
University of Southern Denmark
Campusvej 55
DK-5230 Odense M
Phone: +45 65 50 34 31,+45 29 12 57 68
E-mail: charlottekro@sdu.dk