Dr. Veronika Siegl

Veronika Siegl is a social anthropologist and gender studies scholar interested in the intersecting questions of ethics, inequality and autonomy in the context of (reproductive) medicine.

In her postdoc project, Veronika explores the negotiation of life and death in the context of selective pregnancy termination in Austria – against the background of medical discourses and technologies, socio-cultural understandings of health and dis-/ability, prognostic uncertainties, the lack of clear legal guidelines as well as the visceral materiality of the dead/dying foetus.

Her PhD project (at the University of Bern) focused on commercial surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and analysed a surrogacy market characterised by secrecy, distrust, and anonymous business relationships. In the subsequent monograph “Intimate Strangers” (Cornell UP, 2023), Veronika scrutinises the ethical labour of making and circulating “truths”, invested by surrogacy participants in order to grapple with the moral ambiguity of surrogacy. These truths form an integral and indispensable part of the surrogacy market, lubricating its expansion into intimate spheres of life that play out on women's bodies as mothers and workers.