The ‘ticking of the biological clock’ has been a sieve for these concerns, laid at the feet of women seen to be voluntarily deferring pregnancy (or giving it up altogether) ( Briggs, 2017, Damaske, 2011, Harwood, 2007, Roberts, 1997). These demographic shifts have only expanded in the last 50 years (sharply, it appears, during the pandemic), and have been problematized by different actors for a variety of individual, social and political reasons ( Bratti and Cavalli, 2014, Gallagher, 2020, Kearney and Monday, 2020, Li et al., 2011, Waldby and Cooper, 2008). A corresponding rising age of first birth and decreasing national birth rate resulted in heightened concerns about fertility ( Casper and Bianchi, 2001, Li et al., 2011, Wyndham et al., 2012). These concerns coalesce in the concept of the ‘biological clock’, which first emerged in the US popular imaginary in the 1970s during a time of significant changes in family formation, access to contraception and legalized abortion, decreasing wages and job stability, and women’s increased participation in paid work and higher education ( Bratti and Cavalli, 2014, Daniluk et al., 2012, Friese et al., 2006). Recent media reports of a ‘pandemic baby bust’ reinforce decades-long concerns about increasing numbers of people postponing parenthood, and what that might mean both for individuals and for the wider society ( Broster, 2021, Dockterman, 2020). Each of these aspects point to important ways that reproductive desire and time shape the labour of reproductive workers, highlighting temporal constraints to assisted reproduction and limits to ART as a solution to delayed reproduction and the biological clock. My findings point to four important ART time-related issues: (i) women desiring to extend their own ‘biological clocks’ via surrogacy (ii) significant time being needed to achieve and sustain third-party pregnancy (iii) women extending their total reproductive time via repeat surrogacy ‘journeys’ and (iv) temporal constraints to surrogacy reproduction regarding time of year, the day-to-day time effort, the number of surrogacy journeys, the total number of pregnancies, and surrogates’ age and the ages of their children. Based on interview data with gestational surrogates, I propose a new concept of the ‘ART clock’ to capture how time shapes the experiences of reproductive workers in the US fertility clinic. In this study, I analyse how surrogates in the USA understand their own bioavailability for others’ reproductive needs in the commercial ART market vis-à-vis their own reproductive trajectories. Conceptualizations of the ‘biological clock’ in popular imaginary in the USA centre on the temporal limits of fertility, with assisted reproductive technology (ART) an increasingly proposed answer to these constraints (at least in the public imaginary).
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