Designing Desire, Deleting Futures: The Global Fertility Industry and the Price of Perfection

A groundbreaking ethnography of reproductive technology, reproductive labor, and fertility industries across Asia and Africa.

In Designing Desire, Deleting Futures, Amrita Pande traces the flows of reproductive labor and reproductive technologies across Asia and Africa to show how global fertility markets produce, distribute, and constrain reproductive futures. Drawing on an itinerant ethnography conducted between 2012 and 2023, it follows the journeys of egg providers, gestational mothers, and intended parents across multiple clinics and countries, revealing how desires for genetic relatedness and selective reproduction are shaped by intersecting inequalities, postcolonial legacies, and the political economies of global fertility.

The book introduces the unique analytic of the “3Ds”: Desire, Design, and Deletability, which describes how parental and societal desires intersect with emerging reproductive technologies to produce futures in which some bodies are prioritized while others are rendered disposable. By centering caste, race, gender, sexuality, and disability, and by foregrounding minority imaginations from the Global South, the book reframes debates about perfectibility, reproductive justice, and the ethics of intervention in human life.