CORTH Senior Research Advisor Ayo Wahlberg, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, has recently published his book Good Quality-The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China. 

Abstract:

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji).
 
Good Quality explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.

Reviews:

"The scholarship in this book is superior. Ayo Wahlberg has devoted thousands of hours in the field to collecting and analyzing this fascinating data. His refusal to take up the often-belabored globalization framework for understanding reproductive technologies in China is truly provocative." —Liberty Barnes, author of Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity

"Ayo Wahlberg offers a fascinating analysis of sperm banking in China, situated in the political history of China’s restrictive reproductive policies. A must-read for scholars of medicine and anyone interested in reproductive technologies.” —Rene Almeling, author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm

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