Universität zu Köln

Research

This project explores how “life” is negotiated in the context of late abortions on embryopathic grounds. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Austria – where late abortions have recently been strongly contested – the project zooms in on sites where and moments when parents-to-be, doctors, geneticists and obstetricians make existential decisions regarding un/born “life”. These intersecting sites and moments reflect how actors negotiate potential future lives (not) worth living, on the one hand, and the materiality of “dead life”, on the other. The project is grounded in the fields of medical anthropology and gender studies, and contributes to interdisciplinary debates on “life” in contemporary Europe – at a time and place marked by a political move to the right, an economic rationale of efficiency and cost-calculation, rapid technological development and the increased medicalisation of pregnancy.

The dissertation „Fragile Truths” scrutinizes the intimate and affective relations produced in the sphere of commercial surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine. It ethnographically examines how actors within and at the fringes of the surrogacy market “ethically labor” on themselves and others, in order to find, internalize, create and circulate certain truths about surrogacy. The thesis illustrates the significance of producing truths that accelerate capitalist expansion into new, morally contested, spheres of life, which play out on the bodies of women as mothers and workers. This research was part of the larger, SNSF-funded, project „Intimate Uncertainties. Precarious Life and Moral Economy across European Borders“ (PI: Prof. Sabine Strasser).