Lorraine Culley

Professor of Social Sciences and Health

Title: 'Babies Beyond Borders: Reproductive Technologies in the Age of Glabalisation'

Over 40 million women worldwide experience infertility. Many can now be helped to have a child through a range of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), some of which give rise to new, and for some unsettling, family forms. A child may have 3 ‘mothers’; a grandmother may conceive her own grandchild; a 67 year old can give birth to twins.  Increasingly, ARTs are practised in a global context and this elicits passionate debates about ‘fertility tourists’, ‘designer babies’ and ‘wombs for rent.’ Drawing on the latest project in a body of work exploring the experiences and perceptions of infertility and assisted conception, this lecture examines the genesis and extent of ‘transnational reproduction’, and discusses some of the experiences of those most intimately involved in it: the global consumers of the commerce of conception.

Lorraine Culley is Professor of Social Science and Health at DMU, and a graduate of the Universities of Liverpool (BA, PhD) and London (MA). She has been teaching and researching in the social sciences for over 35 years. During that time she has published a wide range of work focusing primarily on diversity and inequality. Her most recent work includes research on the social and political aspects of new reproductive technologies. She is currently leading an ESRC funded study of Transnational Reproduction and recently co-edited Marginalized Reproduction: Ethnicity, Infertility and Reproductive Technologies (Earthscan 2009).

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