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Exposes the racial hierarchies in how human eggs are marketed and sold
Conceiving Asian Babies offers a compelling and timely exploration of race, identity, reproduction, and capitalism within the industry of human egg donation. Far from being a purely medical or personal matter, egg donation serves as a powerful lens for understanding how race-based hierarchies and racial capitalism operate within one of our most intimate life processes: creating a family.
Daisy Deomampo examines how racial capitalism fundamentally shapes the market for human eggs. By focusing on the ways the egg donation industry constructs race and identity, Deomampo shows how the demand for "Asian eggs" as a commodity reinforces biogenetic understandings of race. By exploring the overt and subtle ways the egg donor market reifies racial identities, the book illuminates the profound and often troubling links between racial capitalism and reproductive projects.
Centering the experiences of women enmeshed in the industry, the book displays how the egg donation industry reinforces racial hierarchies and shapes notions of family and identity for Asian American communities. Offering a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of how race becomes a source of capital, benefit, and risk in the global reproductive market, Conceiving Asian Babies illustrates the links between reproductive practices and capitalist motivations.
— Marcia C. Inhorn, author of Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs
"A pathbreaking and timely work. It centers Asian American women's experiences in the US egg donation industry to expose how racial capitalism reshapes the intimacy of human reproduction into a racialized market. Deomampo’s incisive framework 'reproductive racial capitalism' offers a powerful new lens that unmasks how family-making through assisted reproductive technologies drives racial stratification and eugenic hierarchies. Ultimately, Deomampo invites us to imagine family differently— unbounded by racial categories or biological conceptions of race."
— Dána-Ain Davis, author of Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth
"The extraction and sale of human eggs have become a global industry, with close to a million babies born as a result. Yet, when these eggs, like items on a menu, come to be commercially catalogued and priced, systemic inequalities and forms of discrimination are reinforced in embodied ways. In Conceiving Asian Babies, Daisy Deomampo provides us with a much-needed critical analysis of how capitalism differently (de-)values human biological materials in racialized ways. Weaving through ethnographically rich chapters, Deomampo insists on the need to imagine and act otherwise."
— Ayo Wahlberg, author of Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China