The plurality of norms that factor into Canadians’ decisions to engage in transnational egg transactions

Abstract

Egg donation is regulated differently in countries around the world. In Canada, federal law – the Assisted Human Reproduction Act – prohibits paying egg providers. As a result, many Canadians are engaging in a grey market for eggs or are pursuing transnational egg transactions by traveling to countries with more permissive laws, or having eggs shipped to Canada. In this paper I rely on interview data with 18 Canadian intended parents and 16 Canadian egg providers – many of whom had traveled abroad for egg transactions – to understand how intended parents and egg providers decide how they will pursue egg transactions; specifically, why so many Canadians choose to engage in transnational egg transactions. I use Brian Z. Tamanaha’s theory of systems of normative ordering, combined with Paul Schiff Berman’s cosmopolitan pluralism, as a framework to reveal the plurality of norms and other factors that weigh into this decision-making and that help reveal the answer to the “why.” Ultimately, I illustrate how intended parents and egg providers are impacted by sometimes clashing norms from official legal systems, economic/capitalist systems, and customary/cultural systems. These norms, along with moral and practical concerns, shape the decisions of intended parents and egg providers.

Keywords:

• Assisted reproduction
• egg donation
• legal pluralism
• Canada
• transnational egg donation

Acknowledgments

Thanks goes to Lincoln Alexander School of Law JD students Lucas Marqus and Kristen Hogg for their wonderful research assistance.

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Most literature on egg transactions, including some of my earlier work, uses “women” because the individuals I interviewed for this research self-identified as cisgender women. However, in this article I use “person” to capture the fact that eggs are not only provided by cis women, but are also provided by transgender, gender non-binary, and gender non-conforming folk.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship and the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust at the University of Cambridge.