Egg Donation in the Making: Gender, Selection and (In)Visibilities in the Spanish Bioeconomy of Reproduction

Funes, Sara Lafuente

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-55651-2_11

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…There is a limit on the number of babies born from a single provider (6), but without a registry, it has been difficult to keep track. Even though Spain is subject to the same Directive as other countries in the EU, authors have pointed to the markets and business models that have evolved specifically around egg provision in Spain (Degli Esposti & Pavone, 2019 ; Lafuente Funes, 2017 , 2020 ; Molas, 2021 ).…”

Section: Study Design and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Egg donation in the age of vitrification: A study of egg providers’ perceptions and experiences in the UK, Belgium and Spain

Funes

Weis

Hudson

et al. 2022

Sociology Health & Illness

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IVF treatment involving donated eggs increases yearly.Numerous technical and commercial transformations have reshaped how eggs are retrieved, stored and managed. A key transformation is vitrification; a 'fast freezing' method that allows efficient preservation of eggs, and therefore more flexibility in use, giving rise to new commercial possibilities. There has been limited focus on egg providers' experiences in the context of vitrification and related commercialisation. We report findings from a study in the UK, Spain and Belgium, where we interviewed 75 egg providers. Comparing experiences within different donation 'regimes' allows an exploration of how varying national practices and policies shape information-giving and women's experiences. In the UK, a system of 'informed gift-giving' was described, where egg providers saw their actions as not-for-profit and felt relatively well informed. In Belgium, the system was presented as 'trusted tissue exchange': with less information-giving than in the UK, but clinics were trusted to act responsibly. In Spain, a 'closed-door, market-driven' system was described, whereby egg providers received little information and

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Section: Study Design and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Egg donation in the age of vitrification: A study of egg providers’ perceptions and experiences in the UK, Belgium and Spain

Funes

Weis

Hudson

et al. 2022

Sociology Health & Illness

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“…12 There are nonetheless undeniable historical contingencies to the processes of uneven development in the global fertility industry that relate to both ongoing and past (settler) colonial processes of resource extraction, conquest, slavery, and demographic settlement (Vora 2015;Vertommen 2017;Weinbaum 2019). The division of reproductive labor in the global fertility industry is not only highly gendered but also racialized in ways that are embedded in colonial genealogies (Deomampo 2016;Schurr 2017;Lafuente-Funes 2017). First, there is a wide distribution gap between reproductive workers across the world.…”

Section: (Post)colonial Geographies Of Uneven Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

Vertommen

Pavone

Nahman

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account (1) the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, (2) their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and (3) the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the (4) constitutive role of (supra)national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/Palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain.

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“…Conditions that allow the public and private system to appropriate "donated" eggs in an industry that Degli Esposti and Pavone (2019) name a "(quasi) social market," highlighting how the currency of altruism turns providers into donors, prevent the debate of alternative forms of valuation for their reproductive labor. The work of Lafuente-Funes is also key for the conceptualization of this article, as she has taken interest in the materiality and ontological realities of eggs in different contexts (clinic, labs and universities) of the Spanish landscape (Lafuente-Funes 2017a), as well as the roles of egg donation in IVF clinical practices, and in professionals' narratives (Lafuente-Funes 2017a, 2017b.…”

Section: Context: Spain As the European Hotspot For Egg Donationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selecting women, taming bodies? Body ontologies in egg donation practices in Spain

Molas

Perler

2020

Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society

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According to the Spanish law of assisted reproduction, women intending to donate eggs must be "in good psychophysical health" and "do not suffer from genetic or infectious hereditary diseases transmissible to the offspring" (chapter II, article 5). What a "good" psychophysical health condition is, what the "transmissible diseases" are, and what counts as disease at all remains contested. In this paper, we explore how these broad legal criteria materialize through different tests and selection procedures. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Spanish fertility clinics and with egg donors in Spain, we argue that selection and management procedures are organized to split egg donors as "multiple bodies" (Mol 2002), which will have to be tamed in different ways. On the one hand, we will refer to the making of a "biographical subject," for which we understand the donor to be a conscious autonomous subject. And on the other hand, we refer to the "body object," for which we understand the donor to be a terrain of potential extractability. As we argue, clinics aim to select a responsible biographical subject who kindly obeys professionals' instructions throughout the process in order to make the body object accessible to clinics' extraction purposes. To conclude, our paper sheds light on issues of "reproductive in/ justice" by discussing how the reproductive rights of intended parents through egg donation are entangled with inequalities of egg donors.

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Egg Donation in the Making: Gender, Selection and (In)Visibilities in the Spanish Bioeconomy of Reproduction

Cited by 16 publications

References 16 publications

Egg donation in the age of vitrification: A study of egg providers’ perceptions and experiences in the UK, Belgium and Spain

Egg donation in the age of vitrification: A study of egg providers’ perceptions and experiences in the UK, Belgium and Spain

Global Fertility Chains: An Integrative Political Economy Approach to Understanding the Reproductive Bioeconomy

Selecting women, taming bodies? Body ontologies in egg donation practices in Spain

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