ABSTRACT
Women’s lives within families, societies and nations are being reformed by contemporary global social and economic trends; increased human mobility, global trade, labour market changes, and technological and communication developments. Within these processes of globalization, changes in women’s fertility, the development of the global market in reproductive technologies, the rising transnational labour market demand for feminized care work, and changing family forms have had specifi c impacts on women’s reproduction and how they care for children. Placing motherhood at the centre of our critical focus connects women’s physical, affective, familial, and social experiences, but also reveals how these processes of globalization change, commodify and remake women’s reproductive activities and relationships to care. This is the second of our two chapters which lay out our framework for thinking about motherhood, reproductive activity and caring labour across social, national and regional boundaries, across divisions between the Global North and the Global South; here we focus directly on defi ning motherhood and its centrality to the critical intersections of global care defi - cits, global reproductive markets and intercountry adoption.
