The Pain of Egg-Donation

Abstract

Contemporary body practices providing an answer to the subjects’ demand for assisted reproduction procedures, question the subjective experience of pain. The psychoanalytic approach of pain introduces the dimension of the unconscious in bodily experiences. Clinical field work and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with an infertile woman after failed egg-donation in vitro fertilization cycles, allows an understanding of psychic pain as analogous to somatic pain and considers the human body as a psychosomatic entity. In this case study, pain becomes a vector of subjectivation, allowing for the subject to negotiate acceptance of a gift impossible to receive.

Research on The Legal Path of Female Egg Donation in China under The Background of Low Fertility Rate

“…Women who choose to donate eggs will face certain pressure of social public opinion. Some egg donors will think about the consequences of egg donation, such as whether the child's family is happy or not, whether the birth of a child is correct, etc., resulting in long-term psychological problems such as anxiety [20]. Some scholars have also found that once eggs become donable goods, it will lead to the separation of fertility and family connection, break the natural law of sexual intercourse and fertility and the structure of traditional family model, resulting in the conflict between biological parents and sociological parents.…”