Good Quality The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China [Hardcover]

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 Qualityexplores 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 Qualityshows 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.

Ayo Wahlberg is Professor MSO in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. He is coeditor of Selective Reproduction in the Twenty-First Century and Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making.

"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 ofConceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identitylsß