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Paper short abstract

Technological practices show that reproductive time is not fixed. Norms re reproductive time are entwined with existing socially-produced vulnerabilities, including ecological ones. We explore the biological clock and the doomsday clock in relation to environmental reproductive justice in Finland.

Paper long abstract

The temporal logics of reproduction are changing in novel ways due to recent developments in assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), the further-commercialization of healthcare, and the rapid expansion of biotechnological and pharmaceutical enterprises. Technological practices have demonstrated that reproductive time is not a fixed ‘biological clock’. We analyze how norms regarding reproductive time are imposed on people in ways that map onto existing vulnerabilities including gender, race, class, sexuality and disability. We focus on Finland, a Nordic welfare state operating on a confused ethos of universal healthcare and financial capitalist health politics.

Cryopreservation enables a broader transnational traffic in donor gametes. AI data-driven algorithms, also transnationally mobile, promise time- and cost-effective selection of ‘high-quality’ gametes and successful personalised treatments, presuming that AI is an ethical agent. However, there is evidence of ecological damage caused by increased use of AI tools. While reproductive technologies have always raised bioethical and political questions, we discuss how looking at issues of reproductive time can challenge neoliberal ethics. Rising to the challenge, our analysis utilizes a queer feminist lens, considering ecological facets of what is going on. We are attuned to both reproductive rights and reproductive justice in mapping out a framework for gendered reproductive time in bioethics of ART.

Crucially, however, the posthumanist component of our analysis seeks to consider reproductive time (‘the biological clock’) in relation to potential human extinction (‘the doomsday clock’). How could reproductive justice and more-than-human justice exist in the same framework, in social structures haunted by histories of eugenics?