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Abstract
This article examines the relationship between social reproduction and reproductive technologies in Canada to interrogate the value in reconceiving egg donation as a form of labour, rather than as a matter of health. It argues that understanding egg donation as labour both highlights the potential for egg donors to be autonomous, agentic subjects within exploitative circumstances, and offers new possibilities for the governance of what has been, to date, a failed policy field.
Notes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Sharon Batt, Françoise Baylis, Megan Gaucher, Robyn Lee, and the reviewers at Studies in Political Economy for their helpful feedback on drafts of this article. Thank you also to Jenny Reich for her excellent research assistance and Rebecca Schein for patiently working through the editing process with me. I am also grateful to the audiences who engaged with this work in its early stages, both at the 2014 Canadian Bioethics Association conference and the 2015 Canadian Political Science Association annual conference.
Disclosure statement
The author reports no conflicts of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of this article.
Funding
This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research [grant number MFE-339439-234608].
Notes on contributor
Alana Cattapan is a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) postdoctoral fellow at Novel Tech Ethics in the Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Notes
1 Rivera, Mechanized Motherhood.
2 Alexandros of Antioch, Venus de Milo.
3 Vosko, “Rethinking Feminization”; Luxton, “Feminism as a Class Act”; Cohen and Pulkingham, Public Policy for Women.
4 For the purposes of this paper, the term “egg donation” refers to the provision of eggs (oocytes) in cases where money both is and is not paid to the woman providing the eggs. The term “egg donors” refers to women who provide eggs in these circumstances with or without payment. The language of donation and of donors implicitly suggests no pay, and, in some contexts, scholars have used the language of “providers” and “egg provision” to avoid this interpretation. For the purposes of this paper, however, the term “donation” follows popular parlance as well as the advocacy work conducted by donors themselves. See, for example, Downie and Baylis, “Transnational Trade in Human Eggs.”
5 Vosko, Managing the Margins.
6 Waldby and Cooper, “The Biopolitics of Reproduction.”
7 Porcu, Ciotti, and Venturoli, Handbook of Human Oocyte Cryopreservation.
8 Butler, “Merely Cultural.”
9 Rubin, The Traffic in Women.
10 Hennessy, “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture”; Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure; Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”; Arat-Koc, “In the Privacy of Our Own Home.”
11 Federici, Wages Against Housework.
12 Bakker and Gill, “Global Political Economy and Social Reproduction.”
13 Corea, The Mother Machine; Rothman, “The Meanings of Choice in Reproductive Technology”; Klein, Infertility; Mies, “Why Do We Need All This?”; Overall, Ethics and Human Reproduction; Poff, “Reproductive Technology and Social Policy in Canada”; Raymond, Women as Wombs; Stanworth, “Reproductive Technologies and the Deconstruction of Motherhood.”
14 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault; Lublin, Pandora’s Box.
15 Corea, The Mother Machine.
16 Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
17 Busby and Vun, “Revisiting the Handmaid’s Tale.”
18 Oakley, “From Walking Wombs to Test Tube Babies.”
19 Murphy, “Egg Farming and Women’s Future.”
20 Pande, Wombs in Labour; Pande, “Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India”; Pande, “Not an ‘Angel,’ Not a ‘Whore’”; Crozier, Johnson, and Hajzler, “At the Intersections of Emotional and Biological Labor.”
21 Pande, “Not an ‘Angel,’ Not a ‘Whore,’” 145.
22 Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labor; Thompson, “Why We Should, in Fact, Pay for Egg Donation”; Haimes and Taylor, “Fresh Embryo Donation for Human Embryonic Stem Cell (hESC) Research”; Mitchell and Waldby, “National Biobanks”; Waldby, “Oocyte Markets.”
23 Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labour, 61.
24 Cooper and Waldby, Clinical Labour, 8.
25 Gruben, “Women as Patients, Not Spare Parts.”
26 See, for example, Motluk, “The Human Egg Trade”; Motluk, “Is Egg Donation Dangerous?”; Gruben, “Women as Patients, Not Spare Parts.”
27 Trounson et al., “Pregnancy Established in an Infertile Patient after Transfer of a Donated Embryo Fertilised in vitro.”
28 Eichler, “Frankenstein Meets Kafka”; Vandelac, “The Baird Commission.”
29 Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, Proceed with Care.
30 Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, Proceed with Care; Canada, Health Canada, New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies: Setting Boundaries, Enhancing Health; Canada, Parliament, Standing Committee on Health, Assisted Human Reproduction: Building Families.
31 Cattapan, “Risky Business.”
32 See, for example, C-247 (1997), C-56 (2002) and C-13 (2003).
33 Assisted Human Reproduction Act (2004).
34 Motluk, “The Human Egg Trade”; Ogilvie, “The Price of Eggs”; Blaze Carlson, “Baby By Stealth”; Blackwell, “The Impotence of Canada’s Fertility Laws.”
35 The case in question, R v. Picard and Canadian Fertility Consulting Ltd., occurred only after the agency had already closed. See, for example, Baylis and Downie, “The Tale of Assisted Human Reproduction Canada”; Picard, “Fertility Law Needs a Reset”; Galloway, “Agency Has Little to Show for Millions in Funding.”
36 Ruparelia, “Giving Away the ‘Gift of Life’”; Cattapan, “Risky Business.”
37 Gruben, “Women as Patients, Not Spare Parts,” 269.
38 Ibid.
39 Havelock et al. Guidelines on Third Party Reproduction.
40 Motluk, “Is Egg Donation Dangerous?”
41 Almeling, Sex Cells.
42 Gruben, “Women as Patients, Not Spare Parts.”
43 Almeling, Sex Cells; Jiménez, “Eggs Shouldn’t Go to the Highest Bidder.”
44 Almeling, Sex Cells, 130−31.
45 Federici, Wages Against Housework, 2.
46 Almeling, Sex Cells, 130−31.
47 Boris and Parreñas, Intimate Labors.
48 Mamo, “Fertility Inc.”
49 Practice Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “Repetitive Oocyte Donation.”
50 See weareeggdonors.com.
51 Canada, Heath Canada, Feedback Report: Submissions and Written Comments on Proposed Federal RGTs Legislation.
52 Crozier, Johnson, and Hajzler, “At the Intersections of Emotional and Biological Labour.”
53 Jackson, “Compensating Egg Donors.”
54 Montpetit, “Policy Networks, Federalism and Managerial Ideas”; Harvison Young and Wasunna, “Wrestling with the Limits of the Law.”
55 Ogbogu, “Reference Re. Assisted Human Reproduction Act and the Future of Technology-Assisted Reproduction and Embryo Research in Canada.”
56 Snow, “Explaining a Policy Failure.”
57 Leve, “Reproductive Bodies and Bits.”