On 17 November, Polina Vlasenko delivered the lecture “Reproductive Markets in Wartime: Ukraine’s Fertility Industry and the Shifting Geographies of Global Reproduction” at the University of Chicago, examining how the war is reshaping Ukraine’s fertility industry: from sustaining a global supply of donor eggs amidst displacement, infrastructural damage, and legal uncertainty, to the ways egg donation functions as income under conditions of precarity.
While surrogacy has sharply declined, Ukraine has maintained transnational donor-egg supply chains through biomaterial cryopreservation and transport, relying on international partnerships, logistical innovations, and the navigation of regulations across different markets. The talk also explored Ukraine’s peripheral position in the global reproductive economy and how professionals respond to Western suspicions regarding quality, safety, and ethics by asserting “European” standards of professionalism, even as demand shifts toward other emerging markets.
The event was hosted 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.