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Abstract
Professionals compete and cooperate over how states should govern their population. Declining fertility rates in advanced economies have led to debates about how to enable those of reproductive age to have more children and to have them earlier. This springs from political and socio-economic concerns about fulfilling desired fertility rates, maintaining high levels of human capital, and supporting fiscal and pension systems. This article investigates professionals addressing declining fertility through assisted reproductive technologies (ART), including doctors, demographers and economists. These professional groups have their own bodies of knowledge on how they view fertility, fecundity and the role of women in social reproduction. They can also cooperate to create ‘issue linkages’ on ART across their professional ecologies. The article discusses how professionals apply their bodies of knowledge to the political economy of fertility. Professional bodies of knowledge directly inform how women and men are treated on fertility issues and the policy options available.
Acknowledgements
We thank Cornel Ban, Peter Katzenstein, Donna Lee, Gerda Neyer, Ole Jacob Sending, Nicki Smith, Betty Thomson, Duncan Wigan and Angela Wigger for their comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Leonard Seabrooke is Professor of International Political Economy and Economic Sociology in the Department of Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School, and Research Professor II at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. His research concentrates on transnational professionals, market emergence and governance issues in finance, housing, tax, NGOs and international organisations.
Eleni Tsingou is Associate Professor of International Political Economy in the Department of Business and Politics at the Copenhagen Business School. Her current work focuses on forms of authority in financial governance, and the role of expert networks on demographic change.
Notes
1. For example: ‘Company-Paid Egg Freezing Will Be the Great Equalizer’, Time, 15 October 2014 (http://time.com/3509930/company-paid-egg-freezing-will-be-the-great-equalizer/ [accessed 1 November 2014]).
2. Interview with demographer, National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, Tokyo, Japan, November 2012.
3. European Parliament resolution of 21 February 2008 on the demographic future of Europe (P6_TA(2008)0066) – [2007/2156(INI)]).
4. Challenges to expertise by breast cancer activists (Klawiter Citation2008: 289) and parents of autistic children providing particularly prominent examples (Eyal et al. Citation2010).
5. Interview with demographer, Vienna Institute of Demography, Busan, Korea, August 2013.
6. Publication in these journals is a source of considerable prestige for social scientists.
7. Special Interest Workshop on Andrology, European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, London, UK, 7 July 2013.
8. Unless otherwise stated, the literature cited in this section is explicit about linking professional approaches.
9. Interviews with demographers, Vienna Institute of Demography, Vienna, Austria, June 2012; National Institute for Demographic Studies, Paris, France, October 2013.
10. The first symposium on ‘Social Egg Freezing’ took place in 2013 (Barcelona, Spain, 1 February).
11. Special Interest Workshop on Andrology, European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, London, UK, 7 July 2013.
12. Case study integrity meeting, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2012.
13. Professional disputes between demographers, doctors and economists often involve contrasting period total fertility rates, such as those used in , with completed fertility rates, which follow cohorts of women to the end of their reproductive years, conventionally standing at 44 years of age. Total fertility rates provide an index on current trends, while completed fertility rates provide more information on what actually happened.
14. Note, however, a non-European comparison with Brazil, where the net present value for a 2010 IVF child during stable economic conditions was positive but negative during a crisis, which the authors assumed could be offset by children from subsequent generations (Kröger and Ejzenberg Citation2012).
15. Special Interest Workshop on Andrology, European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, London, UK, 7 July 2013.
16. Special Interest Workshop on Andrology, European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, London, UK, 7 July 2013.
17. As more registers record data on couples and male age this is likely to change.