“The Right Way to Reproduce”: Navigating the Moral Economies of Assisted Reproduction in Central Asia

COMPAS Postdoctoral Researchers, Dr Shahnoza Nozimova and Dr Polina Vlasenko, will present their research on how various actors involved in assisted reproductive technology (ART) — infertility patients, egg donors, surrogates, and medical professionals — navigate the ambivalent moral economies of what constitutes the “right” way of kin-making. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Central Asian contexts, they examine how social norms, religious discourses, and gender and economic precarity shape reproductive subjectivities, practices, and behaviours.

Even though reproductive technologies offer infertile individuals and couples new imaginaries of fertility, they operate within a moral landscape that upholds genetic, biological, and timely reproduction within heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate form of family-making. While internalizing a reproductive mandate and experiencing stigma for failing to conceive in a socially accepted way, infertile patients negotiate their use of ARTs through practices of secrecy and mimicry. Surrogates and egg donors are on the other side of the stigma continuum. By offering their fertility in exchange for money outside of marital relationships, these women are frowned upon for exercising fertility in ways that deviate from normative expectations. Reproductive medical professionals work to legitimize ARTs within this contested moral terrain.

In Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, this involves drawing boundaries by excluding gamete donation and surrogacy, which are not morally recognized and/or legally allowed. In Kazakhstan, it means reframing gamete donation and surrogacy as both acceptable medical and family-making solutions and legitimate income-generating strategies. Throughout the region, mobilities offer means to navigate the social, legal, and moral barriers, resulting in new reproductive strategies and identities amidst uncertainties and dominant gender and family ideologies.

Organised by the Wolfson SEA Society and the Central Asian and Turkic Studies (CATS) Cluster