Paper short abstract:

Infertile sub-saharan women travel to other African countries and to Europe in order to have access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART). This mobility across national and international borders has taken place in Sub-Africa since the 1990s.

Paper long abstract:

The lives of infertile Sub-African women are generally depicted as marked by suffering and exclusion. They feel a pressure from their family and other relatives, especially women. Infertile sub-saharan women travel to other African countries or to Europe in order to have access to assisted reproductive technologies. These women have to cope with the cost of the treatment, travel and health services. How do they choose the country, the health service, and the physician? Are the choices individual or undertaken by couples ? Where do they find the money for this?

This paper uses the language of "scapes" to examine the global flows involved in the so-called search for assisted reproductive technologies across national and international borders. Reproductive mobility entails a complex "reproscape" (Inhorn, 2011) of moving people, technologies, finance, media, ideas, and gametes, pursued by infertile couples in their "quests for conception." We will examine reproductive mobility to and from sub-saharan African countries, which are the site of intense globalization and global flows, including individual movements for the purposes of assisted reproduction technology since the 1980s.