Sperm Stories

A landmark study, this book draws on twenty years of dedicated sociological research on donor sperm reproduction to combine extraordinary empirical depth, theoretical innovation, and a remarkably comprehensive analysis of the ethical dimensions surrounding donor conception. Adrian’s practice-based ethical thinking is exactly what the world urgently needs amid the global expansion of third-party reproduction.

-- Chia-Ling Wu,Professor, Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University

Few medical technologies are as ethically charged as those that facilitate and surround third party reproduction. Based on decades-long and careful ethnographic engagement with some of the largest sperm banks in the world in Denmark, Sperm Stories approaches ethics not as a set of adjudicative principles, rather as socio-materially woven into the everyday practices of sperm banking. In doing so, Stine Adrian has provided us with a compelling and much-needed analytic for understanding how medical technologies can be more response-able. Sperm Stories is essential reading for medical students, practitioners and social scholars alike.

-- Ayo Wahlberg, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (author of Good Quality: the Routinization of Sperm Banking in China)

In this compelling account, world leading scholar of assisted reproduction Stine Adrian demonstrates that sperm is generative not simply of children, but also of heated debates about rights to assisted reproduction, the politics and ethics of global markets in gametes, and the commodification of life itself. This book is a must read for anyone who seeks to understand the complex dynamics of a now newly normalized global trade in human reproduction.

-- Bronwyn Parry, Professor, College of Arts & Social Sciences, Australian National Univer