This lecture draws on ethnographic research with medical professionals, donors, surrogates, and intermediaries to examine how the war has reshaped Ukraine’s reproductive market. Once a global hub for both egg donation and surrogacy, Ukraine’s fertility industry continues to operate under extraordinary conditions. While surrogacy has sharply declined, Ukraine has managed to sustain transnational supply chains of donor eggs despite displacement, infrastructural damage, and legal uncertainty. The talk explores how industry actors adapt through international partnerships and logistical innovations, and how women continue to engage in donation and surrogacy as vital forms of income. Yet Ukraine’s position in the global reproductive economy remains defined by its peripheral status: clinics and other market participants face persistent suspicion from Western clients and partners over quality, safety, and ethics. The lecture traces how professionals in the field respond to these hierarchies by asserting “European” standards of professionalism and reliability, even as the war redirects demand toward other emerging markets, reconfiguring the geographies and politics of reproductive labor.
Polina Vlasenko is a cultural and medical anthropologist trained in political philosophy, gender studies, and science and technology studies. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in 2021 and is developing a book based on her dissertation, exploring how Ukraine became a key exporter of donor eggs and how women there perform egg donation as labor amid post-socialist transformations. She is an MSCA Fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, studying how the war has reconfigured the transnational supply chains of Ukrainian donor eggs, and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, examining the migration of surrogate workers from Central Asia to Georgia, a growing node in the global surrogacy economy.
This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Center for East European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.