Transnational reproduction : experiences of Italian reproductive travellers receiving donor gametes and embryos abroad

Abstract

The phenomenon of people crossing regional and national borders to seek assisted reproduction occurs in many countries across the world and involves different actors, including patients, doctors, fertility clinic practitioners, law-makers, donors, surrogates, children, brokers, and others who take part in the globalised industry of assisted reproductive technologies. This dissertation focuses on the experience of Italian reproductive travellers who seek donor conception treatments outside national borders, as a reaction to Italian regulations on assisted reproduction banning gamete donation in Italy. Through the qualitative analysis of the narrations and practices of heterosexual couples, same-sex couples and single women, this work explores the ways in which people face different reproductive itineraries with the aim of achieving reproduction through donor conception in a context of law evasion. In particular, it takes into account the process that leads people to choose donor conception abroad and investigates the ways in which people make sense of this choice in relation to their understanding of kinship formation. The feelings that accompany this process, the concepts that people mobilise to make both law evasion and donor conception practice coherent with their reproductive goals, and the strategies that they employ to "kin" their donor-conceived children are presented and analysed. This study highlights the fact that Italian CBRC travellers who seek donation treatments abroad mainly consider their reproductive experience as a transgressive act, because by doing so they circumvent laws that forbid those treatments locally. They tend to support the moral validity of their choices by arguing that it aims to accomplish what they perceive as a "normal" goal (having a child). Nonetheless, the recourse to such a reproductive experience challenges existing cultural understandings and the social organisation of kinship.