Harvesting Life, Mining Death: Adoption, Surrogacy and Forensics across Borders

Abstract

Transnational adoption and surrogacy make explicit the relations between war, structural violence and crisis, and global shifts in the organization and governance of reproduction. This article focuses on the interrelatedness of vitality and death, and the nexus between biopolitics and necropolitics, through an analysis of adoption and surrogacy. It reinscribes the transnational circulation and exchange of persons, substance and bodily capacities within the logics of multiple genealogies of war, violence, and extraction in the globalized borderlands between Guatemala and Mexico. The article charts the simultaneous demise of transnational adoptions in Guatemala and growth in surrogacy arrangements in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco, as well as the inception of oocyte harvesting for in vitro fertilization (IVF) in reproductive medicine providers in Guatemala City. The article then tracks forms of expertise and technical infrastructure across national borders and domains of knowledge and practice. It shows the proximity between reproductive medicine and forensic science evident in DNA analysis used in forensic anthropology to document human rights violations, but also offered as commercial services in an expanding reproductive medicine sector. This configuration of biolabor encompasses the extractive practices tied to reproductive medicine and forensics, as persons, bodily substance, and, increasingly, bioinformation transverse contexts, jurisdictions, and social and racial formations.