Surrogate labour: exceptional for whom?

The desire for genetically related children is driving an exponential rise in assisted reproductive service provision worldwide, including the Global South. In India, the number of ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) clinics has more than doubled over the past three years. This expansion has been accompanied by a similarly explosive growth in populist narratives that assert that one of the services offered by such clinics, commercial gestational surrogacy (CGS), is a form of labour that is so exceptional(ly) exploitative it should be banned.

Narratives of neoliberalism: 'clinical labour' in context.

Cross-border reproductive care has been thrust under the international spotlight by a series of recent scandals. These have prompted calls to develop more robust means of assessing the exploitative potential of such practices and the need for overarching and normative forms of national and international regulation. Allied theorisations of the emergence of forms of clinical labour have cast the outsourcing of reproductive services such as gamete donation and gestational surrogacy as artefacts of a wider neoliberalisation of service provision.

The afterlife of the slide: exploring emotional attachment to artefactualised bodily traces.

In this paper I explore the role of the slide, not as familiar scientific object, but rather as a fixed remnant that testifies to the lived experience of an individual. Returning to the scene of the public scandal that surrounded the unauthorised retention of children's organs and tissues at two British hospitals in the late 1990s, I investigate the emotional significance that here came to be attached to archived slides. In so doing I draw attention to the ways in which the facticity of the slide--its ability to testify to the fact, or the existence, not only of the person from whom it is drawn, but also, when created for histopathological reasons, the disease that ultimately killed them--acts to efface their presumed ephemerality.

Domesticating biosurveillance: 'containment' and the politics of bioinformation.

Although the term biosurveillance is employed with increasing frequency there remain variances in way in which the concept is both understood and practiced in the US and the UK, respectively. In this paper I begin by exploring the different epistemological and geographical approaches to biosurveillance that are employed in each locality, paying particular attention to the scales at which they, respectively, operate. I also consider how the subjects of these systems (a State's citizenry) are monitored in each jurisdiction and with what effects.

Brain donation for research: consent and re-consent post Alder Hey.

Background: Recent scandals relating to the unconsented retention and use of human organs in the UK have led to widespread changes to governance and ethical frameworks for research throughout England and Wales. Ethics committees now ask for proof of specific consent where general medical research consent was once sufficient. In order to meet these new requirements ongoing medical research studies have had to replace existing consent forms with more detailed ones that must be signed anew by prospective donors.