Tracing Global Fertility Chains Through Georgia

Georgia has become an important destination for commercial surrogacy, but the practice does not exist in isolation. It is part of a wider global system that operates across borders, connecting intended parents, fertility clinics, agencies, and the women who carry pregnancies. In this webinar we follow these global fertility chains, using Georgia as a case study to explore how the surrogacy market works in practice - and who benefits from it.

Joining us in this conversation is Sigrid Vertommen, researcher and a political scientist, who coined the concept of “global fertility chains.” In this webinar, Sigrid will guide us through the different actors involved in these chains, how markets and inequalities connect them across borders, and why looking at the chain as a whole - rather than at individual countries - helps us understand how the global fertility industry operates.

Ketevan Vashagashvili, a documentary filmmaker and a director of the award-winning documentary 9 Month Contract, then takes us to Georgia itself: how the surrogacy market operates there, who is driving demand, and what this means for the women who carry the pregnancies.

In conversation with Irina Herb, the distinguished speakers take us from the bigger picture of global fertility chains to the realities of the surrogacy market in Georgia, offering a rare and well-informed look at one of the industry's central hubs.

The webinar comes at a time when surrogacy is receiving growing attention in public debate, raising important questions about reproductive justice, inequality, the industry, and the movement of people across borders.

This webinar 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