Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (21 page)

Andrew is unusual in mentioning recipients, who rarely appear in sperm donors’ discussions of donation, primarily because bank staff do not spend much time talking about them. In fact, just one of the men knew something specific about the people who bought his sperm. Compare this to nearly 80% of the egg donors, whose knowledge of recipients ranged from knowing what state they lived in to having met them in person. Several of the men did not even have ready-made language for referring to them. Travis, who had been donating at Gametes Inc. for the last eighteen months, hesitated and said, “I don’t know how to say” before calling recipients “post-injected people and their kids.” Victor referred to them as “the purchasers of my samples.” At some point in the interview, most of the sperm donors did make a vague reference to “helping people,” but as men are not given specific information about who these people are, the way in which they help is not only abstract, but also gendered: men contribute to the lives of others through paid production, while women help particular people through compensated giving.

PROUD GIVERS VS. ALIENATED LAB RATS

These gendered conceptualizations of donation are not without consequences. In concert with organizational protocols of payment, in which
women are guaranteed a negotiated sum and men are paid a flat rate for samples that pass, framing donation as a gift or a job creates systematically different experiences of being paid for parts of one’s body. These effects are clear in how egg and sperm donors discussed bodily production, including the extent to which they expressed feelings of alienation from their own bodies.

Both women and men talked about the number of sex cells they generated per donation, but the rationale for their concern with bodily production differed. Men hoped to generate a high-enough sperm count to get paid, and women hoped to make enough eggs to give recipients a good chance at becoming pregnant. Mike, when asked if he could change anything about being a sperm donor, said, “I just hate sometimes when [the lab technician] tells me mine hadn’t passed. Well, I did the same thing! But I just wish we could get money for every time instead of it having to pass.” Travis, a salaried engineer, pointed out that sperm bank advertisements are not entirely straightforward in this regard. “It said make up to twelve hundred bucks a month. That was a little bit of a falsehood, because there’s virtually no way to do that.” Indeed, it would require three donations per week with all samples passing. Unlike Mike, Travis was not in “need” of the money from sperm donation, but he was still irked by the bank’s practices.

Although it was not one of my interview questions, more than half the women reported how many eggs they produced per cycle. But when women raised the issue of bodily production, the focus was not on compensation. For example, Jessica, who had finished her first cycle two months before, explained,

My eggs were kind of slow to mature, and I was kind of frustrated, not at anybody but just myself. I was like, man, I’m going to be upset if I don’t give but about five or ten eggs. You just want to give as much as you can so that [the recipients will] have a chance. Finally in the end, I pulled through, and [the donor manager] said, “You’re just a late bloomer.” So everything worked out well. I was very happy when I woke up, and they’re like “You gave seventeen,” which is good. I think my friend told me the average is between ten and twenty, so it just depends. But I was glad that I gave a decent number, and it worked out well.

This sentiment, of being “frustrated” and “upset” by the prospect of not “giving” enough, is the logical outcome of a donation process that is structured as an altruistic gift exchange between participants who care about each other as well as one in which the donor will be paid regardless of bodily output.

Indeed, women were more likely to suggest that they were being paid for the
process
of donation (time, injections, surgery, and/or risk) rather than the
outcome
(eggs), and the opposite was true of men. Evincing a focus on process, Nicole, a thirty-five-year-old actress who had cycled four times, said, “Whatever thoughts I had about how much I should get as far as money and how much I shouldn’t, it went right out the window, because doing those shots [
laughs
] and going to the doctor like every three days, it’s a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of recovery afterwards. So it’s worth every penny.” Similarly, Heather concluded that “the very fact that they offer [compensation] is kind of like they recognize that you do have to inject yourself and that you are taking risks with your life.”

In contrast, men were more likely to say that they were being paid for sperm or, euphemistically, for “samples,” which are the
outcome
of a donation process that involves not only masturbation, but also abstinence from sexual activity as well as eating healthy foods and getting enough sleep. For example, Fred said he decided to apply at Gametes Inc. after hearing that he could “get sixty-five bucks for samples.” A similar orientation, in which the production of viable sperm is the basis for payment, is clear in Andrew’s response to his mother’s offer to pay him
not
to be a donor. His mother was not thrilled with the idea of having “grandchildren running around” whom she did not know, so “she sent me a check for $500. I’m like, ‘All right, Mom, I won’t donate for ten times then.’ ” At Western Sperm Bank in 2002, Andrew received $50 per passing sample.

This sort of explicit calculation demonstrates that men’s conceptualizations of donation result from the sperm banks’ organizational policy of conditioning payment on sperm count. For example, Manuel, a donor at Western Sperm Bank, described his routine.

I had a routine down. I was in and out in five minutes. I’d get there, take care of business, talk to [the donor manager] for a minute or two. Overall, the whole thing, get there and back, would take no more than half an hour. So it was worth it, because it’s $50 for every usable sample. Of the twelve or thirteen [samples] in that period, I would average eight to ten [passing], so more than half in most cases. So I figure that’s like, if you break it down, that’s $50 for fifteen minutes of work. That’s better than my job at the time.

Although Manuel mentioned the amount of time it takes to travel to and from the sperm bank, his calculations of how much this “work” is worth are based on “usable samples.” Women rarely engaged in this sort of accounting, and the fact that more than half the men did suggests their orientation to donation as piecework, in which they are paid for successfully completing a particular task.

Sperm donors were also more likely than egg donors to make direct reference to donation as a commodified exchange between donor and recipient. They called recipients “customers,” defined the sperm bank as the “middleman,” or noted that their samples were not “on the market yet.” Women did talk about the recipient’s “investment” of time and money to have a child via IVF and egg donation, but they did not go so far as to refer to recipients as paying customers who purchase eggs.
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Ultimately, egg donors spoke with pride about the huge gift they were giving. Heather summarized her experience with egg donation at University Fertility Services.

Giving my eggs to somebody, it’s huge. Being able to look back twenty years later and just knowing that I could contribute to some lady somewhere having kids, giving that gift. The process that I had to go through wasn’t a quick thing. It’s something that I actually had to sit and think about, and it was a process that I had to stick through. I had to stick myself with needles. It was a big memorable event. I mean it’s not like just going to see a movie or something like that. It’s something I chose to do, chose to contribute to some woman somewhere.

Heather is a college student who anticipated having children one day. Erica is a Gametes Inc. donor who stays at home with her two young children. Yet in speaking of her hope that the recipients become pregnant, she revealed a similar conception of the gift, also describing it as “huge.”

Erica: On some levels, I would like to know what happened, just if someone would say you got a successful pregnancy or not. But then if things didn’t work out, I don’t know that I would want to know. I’d almost feel like I’d be carrying that burden, even though I know it’s not necessarily my fault or anything. I hate carrying around someone else’s pain, but we are kind of tied to each other in this way. That might be nice, but it’s also nice that we’re all able to maintain our separate lives, too, because it’s part of the gift.

Rene: Part of a gift in what way?

Erica: A woman is not able, for whatever reason, to have children on her own, but then you just give a couple cells, and she’s able to carry on as if she could. Of course she’s aware, and the child may or may not be aware, that their genetic background is different, but still she’s able to carry a child, have ultrasounds, and see it move and grow and feel the kick and give birth and hold it from that first moment. That’s a big thing, I know. Being able to maintain that as if it were their own. That’s huge.

In contrast, men did not wax poetic about the significance of sperm donation. In fact, in response to an interview question, about a third of the sperm donors said that giving blood was a more significant form of donation. Paul, a twenty-year-old college student, noted, “There are more people that need blood. It’s more a necessity, you get in a car accident or something, but nobody really needs sperm.” No egg donor came to this same conclusion.
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Ultimately, sperm donors referenced feelings of objectification and alienation, describing their bodies as “assets” or “resources” for the sperm bank. For example, Dennis described how an encounter with staff made him think differently about “donating.”

Dennis: When I had a streak of bad samples, my feeling was: whatever, they don’t pay me [for those samples]; it doesn’t matter. I’m donating here. What’s the big deal? It’ll work itself out. But they were like, “You gotta fix this now.” And that took me by surprise. Oh, am I getting fired? [
laughs
] It was the first instance where I was like this is a job. They think of this as a job. You’re sort of like an asset to them, and if you’re
not performing, they don’t want to have any part of you. I finished giving my sample, and they were like, “So you’ve had three bad samples. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what the problem is, but you really need to fix this.” I was like, “Yikes. Okay!” [
laughs
] Too much pressure there. So that was a major mindfuck. That changes the whole way I was approaching it. Now it’s like you need to perform.

Rene: How had you been approaching it before?

Dennis: Just very casual. If I don’t come in, whatever. If I do it, I get fifty bucks. But I wasn’t thinking of it like a business, like a business commitment, like a job, which is essentially what it is really. And they purposely make it like a job, because they are running a business, and they need good samples.

Dennis donated at the feminist nonprofit Western Sperm Bank, which he nevertheless defined as a “business” where staffers make donation “like a job,” which results in “pressure” placed on men to “perform.”

Whereas Dennis was originally interested in donation because he was desperately in need of the money, Ben described himself as “independently wealthy” and talked about donation as an act of “charity.” Yet Ben used language similar to Dennis’ in outlining the spatial experience of being a sperm donor. In most of the banks, men are asked to enter and leave through a separate door from the recipients, and in each case, the “donor door” was around the side or the back of the building. As a result, Ben felt “second class” and identified himself as a “resource” that the bank needs.

Ben: You get an impression you’re not really [the bank’s] chief concern, that when push comes to shove, they would be trying to protect the mother more than the donor when it comes to legal issues. That’s another reason why I was very careful, and I really wanted to be anonymous, because I felt when push came to shove that I’d be the one that got shoved.
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Rene: What gave you that impression?

Ben: Because when you go to the sperm bank, you’re asked to go around the back way. When you leave, you’re going back around the
back way. You’re not going through the front door. I don’t think it’s a big deal, and I understand it. They’re in business for the women. I’m just a resource they need. Their whole ideological reason is to help women empower themselves to have their own children. I understand my place in the whole scheme of things.

Later in the interview he returned to this theme and put it more bluntly. “I felt like a piece of meat almost. I felt like a cow. I’m being milked for something that I can provide.” He concluded that if sperm donors were “really the chief concern, maybe they’d be paid for even the samples that weren’t accepted.”

Ethan echoed these feelings of alienation in his description of the difference between masturbating at home and masturbating at the sperm bank.

What’s weird about it is going into a doctor’s office and jerking off. It’s kind of like a sexual thing you’re using in a totally nonsexual way. It’s not the privacy of your own bedroom, and it’s not whenever else you might choose to masturbate. This is like masturbation on demand. You’re a lab rat. You can go in and smile and say all the nice things you want every morning, but they really want you for one thing. You are a walking sperm donor.

This quote is particularly striking because both Ethan and the donor manager, in independent interviews, talked about how much they liked each other. Although he had stopped donating about six months before, they were still in touch because Ethan and his wife were trying to get pregnant, and the donor manager was giving them advice about timing intercourse based on ovulation. Despite this friendship, he still described himself as “a lab rat,” which demonstrates the power of the sperm banks’ organizational practices to shape the experience of commodification in such a way that it induces feelings of alienation.
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