From Sci-Fi to Reality

Technologically “optimising” embryos once belonged to the world of science fiction. Today, some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential men are investing in technologies that promise to make it possible - the creation of the “perfect baby” is an engineering challenge waiting to be solved.

This “new eugenics” is very different from the coercive state projects of the past. Sometimes described as “neoliberal” or “libertarian” eugenics, it does not tell people who should or should not reproduce. Instead, it frames genetic selection as a matter of individual freedom, health, and personal choice. As one US start-up puts it, the goal is simply “having your best baby”. But if we are free to select, purchase, and optimise the genetic traits of our future children, what happens next?

Jennifer Denbow, a critical feminist political theorist will join us in conversation led by Irina Herb, to help us unpack these emerging developments, from the growing reliance on “tech fixes” for social problems to the financialisation of reproductive technologies and the use of genetic selection.

This webinar closes our Reproductive (In)Justice in and Unequal World series by examining the broader ideologies that are shaping how reproduction is organised, commercialised, and regulated around the world. It asks: How do market-driven ideas of human “improvement” fit into the wider political economy of reproduction? And what is at stake when the promise of the “best baby” is shaped through capitalism, markets, and technology?

The webinars series is organized and supported by the Global Unit for Feminism and Gender Democracy, the Gunda Werner Institute, and the PRiNA Network.
 

Reproductive (In)Justice In An Unequal World

After the first series of webinar on population and fertility crisis, reproductive racism and migration issues, as well as Big Tech aspirations in the field of human reproduction now we return with three new conversations examining the technologies, markets and ideologies reshaping reproduction across borders.

From surrogacy markets in Ghana and Georgia to the emerging techno-libertarian dream of “building” the perfect baby, we will follow the global chains of money, labour, technology and power that increasingly shape who is enabled (or expected) to reproduce, who carries pregnancies, and which children are imagined as worth investing in.

With leading scholars, and researchers working across feminist theory, science and technology studies, we will ask uncomfortable questions:

→ What happens when pregnancy becomes a globalized service?
→ Who drives the expansion of fertility markets, and who bears their costs?
→ How are new reproductive markets being built across the Global South?
→ And what happens when reproductive technologies turn the child into a project of optimization?
 

Join us in September!
01 SEPTEMBER 2026 | 15:00–16:30 CEST
Registration

15 SEPTEMBER 2026 | 15:00–16:30 CEST
Registration

29 SEPTEMBER 2026 | 15:00–16:30 CEST
Registration
 

Online | Free to attend