Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm by Rene Almeling Read Free Book Online Page A

enough “inventory” for their profiles to be posted to the program’s website, and their vials are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Stored by the hundreds in large tanks, men’s donations resemble a standardized product more so than the eggs that are removed from an individual woman and placed into “her” recipient a few days later. This is probably partly responsible for the different approaches to compensation, in which men are paid a set rate only for those samples deemed acceptable. Although most egg donors receive the market rate, it is common for a woman’s characteristics (such as prior donations, education level, and race) to increase her fee. The personal, one-to-one relationship between altruistic egg donor and grateful egg recipient is codified into an actual gift exchange when staff members encourage recipients to write a thank-you letter or provide a small token of appreciation. Bank staffers do not request similar displays of gratitude for sperm donors.
    Neither biological differences between women and men nor economic laws of supply and demand fully explain the medical market for sex cells. Reproductive cells and reproductive bodies are filtered through economic and cultural lenses in a particular organizational context—that of medicalized egg agencies and sperm banks. It is not just that individual women have fewer eggs than individual men have sperm, or that eggs are more difficult to extract, that produces both high prices and constant gift-talk in egg donation, but the close connection between women’s reproductive bodies and cultural norms of caring motherhood. In contrast, men are much more difficult to recruit, yet they are paid low, standardized prices, and sperm donation is seen as more job than gift. As a result, both eggs and egg donors are more highly valued than sperm and sperm donors in this medical marketplace, where it is not just reproductive material but visions of maternal femininity and paternal masculinity that are marketed and purchased.

PART TWO Experiencing the Market

THREE Producing Eggs and Sperm
    In the medical market for eggs and sperm, women and men are paid money to produce sex cells, a practice referred to as “donation” by egg agencies and sperm banks alike. However, egg donation is organized as a gift exchange, while sperm donation is likened to paid employment. In the second part of the book, I turn from the staff to the donors and ask whether these gendered framings of donation affect women’s and men’s experiences of bodily commodification. In each of the next three chapters, I approach this question from a different angle. First, I examine how egg and sperm donors experience the physical processes of donation; then, I compare how they think about the money they receive; and finally, I analyze how they respond to the possibility of children being born from their donations.
    In this chapter, I focus on egg and sperm donors’ embodied experiences, paying particular attention to how those experiences are shapedby the social context of paid donation. Most of what we know about the physical experience of in vitro fertilization is based on studies of infertile women, who turn to the technology in hopes of conceiving a child. In going through the first part of an IVF cycle, egg donors encounter the same regimen as infertile women: they inject the same medications, attend the same monitoring appointments, and endure the same egg retrieval surgery. 1 Because they are subject to the same technological processes, one might expect that infertile women and egg donors would have very similar physical reactions to the shots and surgery. However, the social context in which these two groups of women experience IVF is very different. Infertile women usually spend tens of thousands of dollars and months, if not years, of their lives trying to become pregnant. Egg donors are young, healthy women who receive thousands of dollars to give the gift of life. This