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This chapter reflects upon the issue of egg donation for research purposes, which has reignited some old debates about reproductive technologies' potential to exploit women, and breathed new life into the so-called ‘unholy alliance’ between feminists and pro-life activists. Drawing analogies with a similar shift in pro-life campaigners' strategic focus in relation to abortion, the chapter highlights and criticizes the development of a new sort of paternalism towards women's decision-making.

This chapter presents Eyad's story about double forms of emergence—both technological and masculine. On the one hand, new forms of reproductive technology are continuously emerging, and once they reach the reproductive marketplace, they are being rapidly discussed, debated, and, in most cases, deployed in Middle Eastern IVF settings. Egg donation is a case in point: after entering Iran in 1999, it spread within a year to Lebanon, where Shia Muslim couples were the first to access this reproductive technology. The willingness of Middle Eastern husbands such as Eyad to accommodate egg donation is a powerful marker of their emerging masculinities. These men have effectively prioritized their wives' own motherhood desires and their conjugal happiness over religious orthodoxies and various practical obstacles and apprehensions.

This chapter examines two major frameworks—body and morality politics—that explain the diverse politics of egg donation. At different moments in the history and regulation of egg donation, these frameworks have gained and lost traction to define egg donation in the U.S. context. This chapter breaks down how body politics and morality politics play a role in this process, both in the contemporary period and the past, tracing how they have shaped the system of egg donation. After laying out the ways that these frameworks help explain egg donation in reproduction and research, this chapter connects body and morality politics to the practical, scholarly, and political histories of this reproductive technology in the U.S. context.

This chapter explores and analyzes the role of partisan women in leadership and in setting agendas around the politics of egg donation at the state level. Given the ways that reproductive health, medicine, and family have been strongly associated with leadership and representation by female legislators in U.S. politics, this chapter explains and analyzes the diverse and complex roles of women in politics on egg donation politics and policymaking. This chapter provides the first comprehensive study of egg donation politics at the state level over time (1995–2010), and it connects the divergent policy strategies around egg donation in reproduction and research to the diverse and varied roles of partisan women in state politics.

This chapter begins a response to the questions of what creates the unique system of egg donation regulations by examining the ways that stakeholders—legislators, advocates, scientists, and invested citizens—frame the issue of egg donation in reproduction and research. I explore one policy area of egg donation politics in the United States, compensation in California, New York, Arizona, and Louisiana between 1990 and 2010. This chapter explores and illuminates framing processes about egg donation through explaining the method of policy narrative analysis, case selection, and political contexts in each state.

Cases illustrating variables relevant to the following topics are presented: criteria for patient selection, egg “donation” and “surrogacy”, multiple gestations, and disposition of in vitro embryos after infertility treatment. For each topic, empirical and theoretical factors relevant to the cases are discussed from an “egalitarian perspective” that imputes privileged status to the standpoint of those who are “nondominant”. Implications of different positions about the moral status of gametes and embryos are also considered.

To understand the ways that egg donation is framed—that is, the ways that stakeholders define problems, diagnose causes for those problems, make judgments, and suggest policy remedies—this chapter examines the ways that definitions and norms of femininity guide state policymaking across the case studies of California, New York, Arizona, and Louisiana. This chapter analyses legislative texts and bill histories, committee and floor transcripts, stakeholders’ direct statements to the public, local press coverage, and official communications. Three major themes emerge among the case studies: gender and agency, vulnerability, and the moral duty of the state. These themes illuminate the processes by which body and morality politics create a logic of state intervention in egg donation.

This chapter concludes the book by providing a brief overview of the theoretical arguments, data, methods, and findings of this book. I argue that the “lady vanishes” in gender and politics around egg donation, obscuring the importance of political subjectivity of egg donors, as well as the relevance of gendered representation to analyses of reproductive technology policy. In this chapter, I argue for three major avenues of research: egg donors as political subjects, feminist policy and gendered representation, and states as “laboratories of democracy” for federal egg-donation policy. This chapter concludes that through these avenues, the politics of egg donation have a more democratic future.

Chapter 3 analyzes constructions of skin color and race in intended parents’ narratives about the experience of selecting an egg donor. This chapter shows how egg donors of different backgrounds are differently valued, bolstering social hierarchies. At the same time, the chapter describes the diversity of ways that intended parents approach race and skin tone when choosing an egg donor. In contrast to dominant assumptions that intended parents seek donors who match their own ethnic backgrounds in order to reproduce whiteness, the process of egg donation represented an opportunity for many intended parents to subvert racial hierarchies by selecting Indian donors with darker skin tones. The chapter argues that such narratives, however, misrecognize donor egg selection as an opening to challenge racial hierarchies; instead, such decisions rely on essentialized notions of race and beauty that exoticize Indian women and reflect new articulations of biological race.

This chapter focuses on the legal regulation of the reproductive technology market, including the fertility clinics and gamete suppliers. For those seeking sperm, there are thousands of possibilities. In the United States alone, dozens of sperm banks are available as part of a business that accounts for about $75 million per year. The number of physicians offering assisted reproductive services has also increased exponentially. However, there is little guarantee about the safety of sperm that one buys, the eggs that are used, the success rate of fertility clinics, or that the embryo created with one's egg and her partner's sperm is the embryo that will be transferred into her body. The amount of market regulation at the state and federal levels with respect to reproductive technologies is limited. This chapter first provides a historical background on artificial insemination as a solution to infertility, along with the programs for both egg and sperm donation. It then discusses self-regulation in the reproductive technology industry before examining the laws that apply to sperm and egg donation.

This chapter provides an overview of the donor-gamete world, beginning with an introduction to the people who use donor eggs and sperm. It explores the many potential recipients of donor gametes, including heterosexual and same-sex couples, as well as single individuals, all of whom are looking for ways to complete their families. The second section discusses the fertility industry, the business that makes it possible for people who want to become parents to procure the gametes and the technology that will allow them to have babies. Although donor insemination (DI) is hundreds of years old, it is only over the past three decades that DI has become an industry, and only over the past two decades that egg donation has become a possibility. The final section turns to the donors themselves, exploring who they are and why they do what they do.

This chapter provides an overview of the donor-gamete world, beginning with an introduction to the people who use donor eggs and sperm. It explores the many potential recipients of donor gametes, including heterosexual and same-sex couples, as well as single individuals, all of whom are looking for ways to complete their families. The second section discusses the fertility industry, the business that makes it possible for people who want to become parents to procure the gametes and the technology that will allow them to have babies. Although donor insemination (DI) is hundreds of years old, it is only over the past three decades that DI has become an industry, and only over the past two decades that egg donation has become a possibility. The final section turns to the donors themselves, exploring who they are and why they do what they do.

This chapter examines various issues relating to egg/sperm donor versus intending parent(s), as well as the partnership rights that a couple may have against each other. In most states, laws provide that a sperm donor has no rights to any resulting child and treat the intending parents as the legal parents. However, very few states have comparable laws dealing with embryo or egg donation. Even the statutes that are in existence are often limited in scope, especially with regards to parenthood issues outside the marriage context. This chapter first considers the laws on families formed through sperm, egg, and embryo donation, and surrogacy, with particular emphasis on marital and nonmarital families, before discussing issues of parentage when same-sex couples form families through any of the reproductive technologies.

This chapter extends the discussion of surrogacy by focusing on how the people of Spey Bay thought about paying for bodily services and substances and what they felt this said about them as members of a community. People in Spey Bay do not think of money as inherently corrupting but hold individuals responsible for their own decisions about how they make and spend it. This chapter analyzes the views of the people of Spey Bay about blood, egg, and sperm donation in order to highlight the connections between community values and reproductive ethics, as well the circulation and meanings of money in their personal and professional lives. In doing so, it revisits questions about the contextual nature of ethics and the broad significance of reproduction in everyday life.

With the possible exception of the post-menopausal pregnant woman, the surrogate mother has been the most controversial figure among the several new types of biological mother and father who came into being with the new reproductive technologies (the others are egg and sperm donors). This chapter explores the uncertainties evoked by surrogacy and more broadly by the notion of the division or doubling of maternal functions (egg provision and pregnancy) that IVF makes practically feasible (but that surrogacy does not, in fact, entail). Two elaborate surrogacy stories from Genesis are analysed (Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar; Jacob, Leah, and Rachel), and an early eighteenth-century Spectator essay by Richard Steele against wet-nursing—in effect, another form of surrogacy

Lately, the number of advanced age women seeking reproductive assistance has risen. While still not a mainstream activity, postmenopausal IVF has garnered attention because of sensationalized cases in the media. Ethicists have addressed this issue from a variety of perspectives, in some cases supporting older women’s rights to access reproductive services, such as egg donation and IVF, and, in other cases, citing concerns for the health and welfare of both older women and their offspring in order to justify preventing these women from accessing ARTs. This chapter considers, from a feminist perspective, the ethical propriety of aged parenting through the use of ARTs and more specifically fertility preservation (FP) techniques. These new technologies allow women to preserve their reproductive capacity so that they may later produce biologically related offspring. The chapter considers the future implications of aged parenting for women and presses the question of whether FP constitutes a “feminist” technology.

Intergenerational studies have been widely used in life course epidemiology both to examine primary research hypotheses and to explore underlying mechanisms for established associations. This chapter describes the theoretical underpinning for using different types of intergenerational studies in life course epidemiology and discusses how results from such studies should be interpreted. Specifically, it considers the use and interpretation of cousin, sibling, and twin intergenerational studies; egg donation/surrogate mother intergenerational studies; maternal-paternal comparisons; and intergenerational migrant studies and Mendelian randomization in intergenerational studies in life course epidemiology.

I introduce the general phenomenon of reproductive travel and survey the existing literature about this type of medical tourism. I apply feminist and globalization theories to this phenomenon as I claim these holidays are political economies of hope (Rose and Novas 2005). I sketch the primary actors of this global care chain: IVF brokers who promise lower middle class North Americans they can have blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies, a European vacation, and excellent health care at affordable prices as well as the North Americans who travel to the Czech Republic for IVF using egg donation. I end the first chapter with a brief discussion of my ethnographic methodology and a layout of the rest of the chapters of the book.

This chapter examines the implications of new reproductive technologies for legal parenthood and other areas of family law. It first considers egg and sperm donation before turning to a discussion of surrogacy. It then analyzes the issue of division of embryos created via in vitro fertilization in case of divorce or the death of either party and concludes by explaining the legal and social issues arising from posthumous reproduction, especially with regards to the question of what to do about children born from embryos created and implanted long after the biological father has died, or implanted in another woman after the biological mother's death.