Risa Cromer

TITLE: Ex Utero: Frozen Embryo Politics in the United States

ABSTRACT: Over a million human embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures have accumulated in fertility clinic freezers across the United States. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the fates of these reproductive remainders became the subject of public debate. In 1998, biologists in a University of Wisconsin lab established the first human embryonic stem cell line from a donated leftover embryo. That same year, the first child was born through the world’s first “embryo adoption” program—a Christian effort to rescue embryos from “frozen orphanages” by facilitating their chances to be born. These coinciding events raised social, political, ethical, and practical questions about what should happen with the accumulating embryos widely deemed as unwanted but un-wastable. Based on twenty-seven months of ethnographic research within programs that make and manage frozen embryos, this talk offers an inside look at American answers to where frozen embryos belong. The figure of the ex utero embryo provides a novel focal point for revealing how racial capitalism, private property regimes, and white settler Christianity co-operate within twenty-first century reproductive politics in the United States.