Emotion, embodiment, and reproductive colonialism in the global human egg trade

Abstract

In the transnational fertility industry, individuals have differently positioned bodies, ranked by race, class, education, socioeconomic status, gender, and citizenship. Different forms of labor support the transnational fertility market, bringing geopolitical, and social inequities to the fore. While some people need wombs, eggs, or sperm to create their families—and have the means to pay for third‐party reproductive services—others emerge as suppliers of reproductive labor, and still others as coordinators or service agents in the international fertility industry. Building upon contemporary feminist social science and postcolonial research on reproductive travel and labor, this article explores three intersecting components: the forces that influence reproductive travel and cross‐border egg donation; how emotion and meaning are framed in clinical settings to recruit a young, healthy, able‐bodied workforce; and the embodied experiences of women who travel across borders to provide eggs for pay. Drawing upon donor and professional interviews, and multisited online and ethnographic fieldwork in fertility clinics, we explore the linkages between emotional choreography and the creation of a bioavailable workforce for the global fertility trade. Here, we examine how local and cross‐border egg provision illuminate global reproductive hierarchies—what we call “reproductive colonialism”—in transnational reproduction.

Eggonomics: Vitrification and bioeconomies of egg donation in the United States and Spain

“…By demonstrating how different cultural and regulatory contexts intersect with donor selection and egg donors’ embodied experiences, we contribute to anthropological discussions surrounding biocitizenship, power, and agency (Pande and Moll, 2018). As have other authors, we have focused on the practices of egg donation in different cultural settings to explore how bioeconomies capitalize on economic inequalities and phenotypic stratification (Daniels and Forsythe, 2012; Deomampo, 2019; Namberger, 2019; Perler and Schurr, 2021; Tober and Kroløkke, 2021). Fertility patients using donor eggs tend to be affluent and predominantly lighter‐skinned people from around the globe (Keehn et al., 2015; Speier, 2016; Whittaker and Speier, 2010).…”

“…Since Spain is the primary provider of donor egg fertility treatment for intended parents coming from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy, fairer donors meet the phenotypic demands of a broader Northern European market (Bergmann, 2011;Tober and Kroløkke, 2021;Vlasenko, 2015Vlasenko, , 2016. Clinics may also shift to recruit different groups for donation as economic conditions change.…”

“…In their discussion of “gendered eugenics” in the US egg and sperm industries, Cynthia Daniels and Erin Heidt‐Forsythe illuminate the problematic aspects of the US free market in human gametes as both reflecting social beliefs surrounding human value and exacerbating hierarchies based on race, gender conformity, and class (2012). Others have also indicated how donor selection is a means of “curating race” (Moll, 2019), how human eggs are “racialized commodities” (Deomampo, 2019), and how donor‐recipient matching amplifies “white desirability” in the transnational fertility industry (Pande, 2020, 2021), all of which exemplify what Tober and Kroløkke refer to as a form “reproductive colonialism” (Tober and Kroløkke, 2021). This article builds upon this work to examine how egg donor selection is organized in two different reproductive bioeconomies.…”

“This place is no better than a jail”: The geographies of surrogate houses in India

“…In gestational surrogacy arrangements in India, a woman carries an embryo created from the egg of the intended mother or a donor, and the sperm from the intended father. Such commercial reproductive services flow from the South to the North, or marginalised to the privileged (Scheper-Hughes, 2011), where the bodies of brown women are prepared to deliver white and rich babies (Deomampo, 2016;Harrison, 2013Harrison, , 2016Tober and Kroløkke, 2021). In order to ensure that the babies remain secure, the surrogacy industry has designed surrogate houses using surveillance and gendered discipline to maintain order in the lives of the 'poor women' who are considered as carelessly too fertile to understand the importance of children in the lives of the commissioning couples.…”

Marketing of donor eggs by offering possibilities for imaginary actualization of recipients’ ideal self

“…Both egg donors and recipients are involved in maternal negotiations, in which women from poorer countries and/or of lesser economic and occupational opportunities relinquish maternal claims so that women from wealthier countries and of sounder economic status can fulfill their aspirations for motherhood (Waldby, 2019). The stratified nature of cross-border reproductive arrangements between donors and recipients led Tober and Kroløkke (2021) to coin the term “reproductive colonialism,” which denotes that the buying and selling of oocytes reflect a new form of European neocolonialism, as they put it: “Fertility outsourcing and cross-border reproductive arrangements illuminate global hierarchies of privilege and assign women different levels of biological value according to place, gender conformity, race, class, esthetic, and type of reproductive labor” (2021: 1782).…”