190 C. Kroløkke and M.N. Petersen
Brännström introduced his keynote at the 2015 Nordic Fertility Society
Conference held in Reykjavik Iceland. The Australian woman provided
Brännström, during his one-year internship in Adelaide Australia in
1998, with the idea for what is now known as uterine transplantation
(hereafter UT).^1 Brännström is not the first to undertake UT, however.
It had already been undertaken, albeit unsuccessfully, in Saudi Arabia in
2000 and later in Turkey in 2011. The Swedish uterine transplantation
project (hereafter UTx)^2 is, however, as Brännström presents it, the first
in the world to successfully carry out a transplant from a live donor to
a woman with absolute uterine factor infertility (AUFI) ,^3 resulting in
the first successful birth of a healthy child in September of 2014. While
Brännström situates his medical quest within a desire to give women like
Angela an ability for genetic and biological motherhood, the remaining
part of his keynote outlined the pioneering medical efforts including the
microsurgical skills required, first undertaken in rodents in Sweden, later
in monkeys in Kenya, and now in humans—inquiring into the nature of
the uterus as a potentially disentangled and reinvigorated reproductive
organ.
In this chapter, we discuss how uterine exchanges whether as UT
or surrogacy are positioned in Danish and Swedish media debates. In
sharp contrast to UT, which involves 10- to 12-h complicated donor
surgery followed by high-risk pregnancies, surrogacy appears less expen-
sive, medically less risky, and a low-tech option yet commercial sur-
rogacy is, nevertheless, de facto illegal in both countries.^4 As noted by
Brännström, in his keynote, UT privileges pregnancy and birthing as a
prerequisite to motherhood and when using the uterus from a known
donor, UT gets positioned within the legitimacy of the extended fam-
ily. Commercial surrogacy contracts are illegal in both Denmark and
Sweden, yet many Swedish and Danish infertile heterosexual and
homosexual couples and singles have turned to commercial surrogacy in
other countries in their pursuit to have a child (Nebeling Petersen et al.
2016 ). The stories of these couples and the legal and ethical grey zones
they operate within have characterised both the Danish and Swedish
public debates on surrogacy. In what follows, we turn to the develop-
ment of the analytical construct of bio-intimacy to help make sense
of how these exchanges are mediated and discussed. Clearly, uterine
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