Abstract
Donated eggs and sperm are key components of many modern-day fertility treatments. In the USA, egg and sperm donors are typically paid to produce gametes for anonymous recipients. In this chapter, I draw on 39 interviews with donors to examine women’s and men’s experiences of bodily commodification. Egg donors and sperm donors have different physical experiences of gamete donation; women must manage their bodies through shots and surgery, while men must engage in routine masturbation and abstinence. However, both egg and sperm donors offer insight into the embodied experience of donating sex cells for money and provide evidence that the social context in which physical experiences occur can produce variation in how the body feels.
This chapter is a revised version of Rene Almeling, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), chapter 3.
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Notes
- 1.
Rene Almeling, Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (Berkeley, CA, 2011).
- 2.
Once the eggs are removed, an egg donor is finished, but an infertile woman must wait a few days to see if fertilization occurs in the laboratory. If it does, the embryos are implanted in her uterus, and she waits to see if pregnancy occurs.
- 3.
Sarah Franklin, Embodied Progress: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception (London, 1997), pp. 130, 114.
- 4.
Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies (Berkeley, CA, 2000), p. 55. See also Charis Thompson, Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (Cambridge, MA, 2005), chapter 6.
- 5.
Additional details about the study are available in Almeling, Sex Cells.
- 6.
All programmes and people have been assigned pseudonyms.
- 7.
Edward Laumann, John Gagnon, Robert Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago, IL, 1994), p. 69.
- 8.
Laumann et al, The Social Organization of Sexuality, pp. 81–6.
- 9.
See Robert Michael, John Gagnon, Edward Laumann, and Gina Kolata, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Boston, MA, 1994), p. 155, which reports results from Laumann et al’s 1994 study but is intended for a general audience.
- 10.
Marcia C. Inhorn, ‘Masturbation, Semen Collection, and Men’s IVF Experiences: Anxieties in the Muslim World’, Body and Society, 13 (2007), p. 47. See also Thompson, Making Parents, chapter 4.
- 11.
Monica Konrad, Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia and Reproductive Gift Exchange between British Ova Donors and Recipients (New York, 2005), pp. 61–6, emphasis added.
Research Resources
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Almeling, R. (2017). Being Paid to Produce Eggs and Sperm: Gender, Commodification, and the Bodily Experiences of Gamete Donors. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_25
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