Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
Symbolic Repair: Governing Reproduction in Germany
Speaker
- Yvonne Frankfurth, STS Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Tenzin Dadak
tdadak@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
Germany has criminally prohibited egg donation since 1991, yet German intended parents access it routinely in Spain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and elsewhere, returning with pregnancies and children whose origins German law does not register. A Bavarian fertility counsellor is prosecuted not for performing egg donation but for helping patients find their way to clinics abroad. And in current reform debates, divided motherhood — the prohibition's founding rationale — is deemed obsolete by the government's own reform commission, only for a new concern, the potential exploitation of donors, to justify a permission so narrow that treatment would continue to move abroad.
Prohibition thus emerges as something other than prevention. From this case, I develop the concept of symbolic repair to ask how legal orders preserve their moral classifications not by resolving the contradictions new technologies expose, but by relocating them — and what this distribution of treatment, risk, and visibility means for how reproduction is governed.
Bio
Yvonne Frankfurth is an STS Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a sociologist of reproduction, law, and technology. Her PhD, completed at the University of Cambridge, examined Germany's Embryo Protection Act and the intended parents who travel abroad for embryo testing and egg donation. Her work combines multi-sited fieldwork and in-depth interviewing with legal and policy analysis. Her current research examines how AI and data-driven platforms are reorganising reproductive decisions, from donor matching to polygenic embryo screening.