Gamete selection in gay male surrogacy: Procreative labor beyond gestation

This article examines gamete selection as a central yet understudied dimension of procreative labor in gay male surrogacy. Drawing on a qualitative study of French intended fathers pursuing transnational surrogacy in Colombia, it analyzes how choices regarding sperm and oocyte donors constitute a form of emotional, reflexive and politically situated labor that extends beyond gestation. While reproductive labor has traditionally been theorized through women's embodied work of pregnancy and care, this article mobilizes and empirically extends the concept of procreative labor to account for reproductive practices that are non-gestational, male, and technologically mediated. The findings show that gamete selection involves intensive reflexive work through which intended fathers negotiate equality within the couple, manage genetic asymmetries, anticipate social stigma, and articulate moral responsibilities toward egg donors. These choices are shaped by biomedical constraints, legal frameworks, and market logics, but also by emotional and ethical considerations, including efforts to recognize and symbolically compensate women's procreative labor in contexts where donor bodies are structurally anonymized and commodified. At the same time, strategies aimed at protecting children from discrimination often reproduce racialized and gendered hierarchies embedded in reproductive markets. By focusing on a triply specific configuration-same-sex male couples, non-compensable genetic choices, and the absence of pregnancy-this article highlights how procreative labor operates as a site where structural inequalities are both made visible and re-enacted through individual decision-making. Without presupposing procreative labor as an analytical framework, the study demonstrates its empirical relevance while extending it to include reflexive, emotional, and political dimensions that remain underexplored in existing scholarship.