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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how war and regulatory uncertainty reshape transnational surrogacy and egg donation in Georgia and Kazakhstan after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, focusing on infrastructural disruption, adaptive practices, and the redistribution of risk in reproductive governance.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how war and regulatory uncertainty reconfigure transnational practices of commercial surrogacy and egg donation in the post-Soviet space, focusing on Georgia and Kazakhstan after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Rather than treating these countries as emerging reproductive hubs, I analyze how reproductive arrangements are disrupted, reorganized, and governed under conditions of crisis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in fertility clinics, cryoshipping companies, and agencies, as well as interviews with medical professionals, intermediaries, surrogate mothers, and egg providers, the paper traces how the war destabilized reproductive infrastructures previously centered in Ukraine. In response, clinics and intermediaries adapt by decentralizing operations, rerouting embryos and gametes, and reorganizing legal and logistical arrangements in anticipation of regulatory closures, including proposed bans on commercial surrogacy for foreign nationals in Georgia. These adaptive strategies shift reproductive mobilities from the movement of bodies to the circulation of reproductive materials, redistributing risk and responsibility across states, markets, and reproductive workers.

Crisis-driven reorganization also intensifies existing inequalities. As reproductive processes are fragmented across countries, women from Central Asia are recruited to provide reproductive labor in Georgia and positioned as the flexible element within these adaptive systems. Their bodies, time, and compliance absorb the consequences of infrastructural disruption, while clinics and states maintain continuity through logistical and legal maneuvering. Situating these dynamics within debates on reproductive governance and crisis politics, the paper shows how reproductive futures are shaped not only through prohibition or violence, but through adaptive market practices that normalize uneven exposure to risk.