Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (22 page)

Women, who are being paid much more money for their sex cells, did not use this same kind of harsh language. Nicole, who donated four times with four different physicians, did call one of the infertility practices a “factory” while complaining about incompetent blood draws, but this language was not directed at her own body. Indeed, she
concluded the interview by talking about how egg donation had made her feel
more
“of value.”

I got on the bone marrow registry after donating [eggs]. I’m just more willing to give up my body physically to those in need. I feel like I have more of a value in some ways. It’s probably part of being an actress; there’s so many times that you don’t get what you want, you don’t get a part or whatever, and it made me feel like I wasn’t of value. So this sort of makes me feel like I am of value and that there is something else for me to contribute to the world.
¹⁵

Nicole does not mention money at all in talking about “giving up her body,” and her logic directly contradicts the assumptions of commodification scholars who contend that being paid for parts of one’s body is inherently dehumanizing.

CONCLUSION

In this medical market, the provision of sex cells for money is framed as a gift or a job, depending on whether the exchange occurs in an egg agency or a sperm bank. It is the prospect of financial compensation that attracts most applicants, yet egg donors respond to the organizational framing by defining paid donation as an altruistic gift that is motivated by care and concern for recipients who cannot have children. In contrast, sperm donors conceptualize paid donation as a job for which they must show up on a regular basis and produce samples with the requisite sperm count. These patterns are robust; they appear in interviews with donors at different points in their lives, with different financial situations, at different stages in the donation process, and from different donation programs in different parts of the country.

But more than just making an appearance in donors’ descriptions, these organizational framings of donation have consequences. In stoking the connection between egg donor and recipient, staffers make it possible for women to construe their participation in this market as an altruistic act for which they are compensated, which seems to offer a
protective effect against other unsavory narratives that could be generated, such as being paid for body parts or even prostitution. However, at the same time, this donor/recipient connection results in pressure on women to engage in the emotional labor of caring about recipients, hoping they become pregnant and feeling guilty if they do not. Sperm donors are not required to think about recipients at all, much less care about them. But this lack of connection, combined with the fact that they are paid based on a bodily performance that is often not up to par, results in feelings of objectification and alienation.

There is nothing inherent in biology or technology that determines these organizational practices. Egg agencies
could
match an individual egg donor with multiple recipients, tell her nothing about them, and condition payment on the number of eggs she produces. Sperm banks
could
foster a one-to-one relationship between an individual sperm donor and “his” recipient, encourage him to consider the plight of infertile couples, and nudge recipients to send thank-you notes and presents.
¹⁶
Men
could
be paid on the basis of process, regardless of the sperm count in a particular deposit, as long as they produced passing samples on a regular basis. For now, however, these exist only as counterfactual possibilities, leaving open the question of whether such changes would actually alter the experience of being paid to produce sex cells.

FIVE
Defining Connections

One potential outcome of egg and sperm donation is children, “offspring” in the parlance of fertility programs, who are genetically related to the donors who provide the raw materials of conception. Scholars and the public alike have been fascinated by the kinship permutations made possible by reproductive technologies, which can result in the splitting of motherhood and fatherhood into genetic, gestational, and social components. In other words, as many as three individuals might contribute biologically to the birth of a single child: the woman who provides the egg, the man who provides the sperm, and the woman who carries the pregnancy to term. These roles may or may not overlap with those of the social parents, the people who care for the child once it is born.

Most social science research on assisted reproduction focuses on recipients, the “intended parents,” and examines how different sorts of biological and social connections shape the relationships they develop with their
children. More recently, the children themselves, many of whom are now adults, have become more vocal about their experiences as donor-conceived children.
¹
(Although, in many cases, parents who use donated gametes do not tell their children, keeping their genetic origins a secret.
²
) For example, the Donor Sibling Registry is a website founded in 2000 by a woman who used donated sperm to conceive her son. She was frustrated by the sperm bank’s insistence on anonymity, and she wanted to create a place where donors and offspring who wanted to could find each other. The site now has more than 25,000 members, including egg and sperm donors, recipient parents, and “donor-conceived people.” It has also provided an opportunity for half-siblings to meet each other, and some “family reunions,” involving ten or fifteen children who are all related to one another through the same donor, have appeared on television news magazines such as
60 Minutes
.

Despite the increasing attention to issues of kinship, there is still very little known about how
donors
understand their position in these brave new families.
³
To what extent do egg and sperm donors feel a connection to the children born of their donations, and how do they define that connection? Generally speaking, there is a societal expectation that women donating eggs will feel more of a connection than men donating sperm. This expectation is driven by a cultural belief in “maternal instinct,” which forms from an amalgam of biological and cultural assumptions about women and their bodies. One influential version of this belief derives from evolutionary psychology. It contends that women have fewer eggs than men have sperm, that it takes more biological effort to produce eggs and bear children, and thus women are more “invested” in offspring than men are.

This is certainly the view of some of the most prominent fertility doctors in the country. When I asked a past president of ASRM what he thinks of as “open questions” in gamete donation, he said it is important to know more about “what happens on the other side of the door. What happens to the donors? Do they forget it, or is it part of their life for the rest of their lives?” He went on to speculate:

Physician: I would suspect that this is very different in women than in men. The sperm donors probably couldn’t give a hoot about what
happened to those kids. They did it for the money. It was easy to collect the sperm and [then] good-bye. The women, I think, will have an investment.

Rene: Where does that investment come from?

Physician: Because women have children. Women relate very differently to children than men.

In this view, biology is at the root of gender differences in how egg and sperm donors relate to offspring: female bodies bear babies and thus women are more invested in children.

Social scientists challenge the idea of maternal instinct as overly reliant on a deterministic view of biology. Just as with biological sex differences, biological ties in the realm of kinship can be differently understood depending on the social context in which they are being referenced. Marilyn Strathern initially raised this point in the context of reproductive technologies, suggesting that they might change the ways in which biology is mobilized in defining relatedness. The studies that followed have demonstrated just how malleable the meaning of biological ties can be.
⁴
Depending on which element—genetics or gestation—is being provided by someone other than the intended parents, that particular element is downplayed. For example, a surrogate mother who carries a fetus conceived from the egg and sperm of the intended parents will downplay her gestational connection in favor of highlighting the female recipient’s genetic connection to the child, defining her as the “real mother.”
⁵
In another example, an infertile woman who uses donated eggs to conceive a fetus that she herself will carry is likely to downplay the egg donor’s genetic connection in favor of highlighting her own gestational role.

As egg and sperm donors, women and men make parallel contributions to reproduction: each provides cells filled with genetic material, but they will not carry the pregnancy or care for the child once it is born. This raises the question of whether egg and sperm donors understand this genetic contribution in the same way. In fact, they do not. In direct contrast to notions of maternal instinct, egg donors insist that they are
not
mothers to children born of their eggs, but sperm donors have a straightforward view of themselves as fathers.

In this chapter, I examine how it is that donors come to these conclusions and look closely at how women and men define their connection to offspring, including the extent to which they make distinctions between biological and social parenthood. I point to the ways that donors’ views are influenced by organizational practices, namely the emphasis on the donor/recipient relationship in egg agencies and the lack thereof in sperm banks. I conclude with a discussion of how donors’ perceptions reflect broader cultural norms around procreation, particularly the longstanding tradition in Western culture that identifies the male role in reproduction as primary.

“I’M A FATHER!”

Most sperm donors define themselves as fathers to children born of their donations.
⁶
Such definitions appeared throughout my interviews and ranged from flippant quips to more serious and subtle discussions of the dimensions of this paternal relationship. The flippant references were more likely to come from younger donors, such as Paul, a twenty-year-old college student who described one of his considerations in deciding to become a donor. “It was like a week and a half or two trying to think everything over, whether or not I actually wanted to have children that I didn’t know about [
laughs
].” Referencing their participation in the banks’ identity-release programs (in which donors agree to future contact with offspring), several men echoed Isaac, a twenty-two-year-old student who noted that one day there could be someone who “shows up on my doorstep saying, ‘Hey, Pops, how you doing?’ ” Mike, a twenty-two-year-old virgin, joked, “I have more kids without having sex than any of [my friends] will actually doing it.” Walt, a nineteen-year-old firefighter, explained how in the four months since he began donating, he started to think not just about the money he was making but about the “kids that you could have later. Like if you’re sitting there at the bar when you’re forty and start hitting on an eighteen-year-old girl, it could be your daughter [
laughs
].”

Older sperm donors also defined themselves as fathers, but their understanding of this role reflects the changing life experiences of men in
their thirties and forties. For example, a few months after our interview, Ethan, a thirty-nine-year-old graduate student, found out his wife was expecting their first child. He contacted me to say that, as a result, some of his views about being a donor had changed, and he agreed to a follow-up interview. He is the only donor I interviewed twice. Ethan described his thoughts after his wife’s positive pregnancy test.

A lot of stuff goes through your mind the next few days. One of them was, “Oh yeah, there’s other children out there. Maybe that was a mistake, that identity-release.” I can’t remember exactly what felt funny, but it just felt funny for a moment where it never felt funny before. Before it felt fun and interesting that I might meet these children some day. But this, all of a sudden now, when you have your own children, when you’ve got your own family and world going on here, that seemed like such an extraneous thing that I did that shouldn’t come back and involve itself in your family.

He described this as his initial reaction, but after a little bit of time passed, he spoke with the donor manager at Western Sperm Bank and “came back down to earth. It’s all good. [The donor manager] explained to me some of the neat things. The kids were sending pictures, and they’re starting now to meet their parents.” In the first quote, Ethan distinguishes the offspring, the “other children,” from his “own children” and his “own family,” but in the second quote, he still refers to sperm donors as “parents” to “kids” who are born from donation.

Another example of this shifting orientation toward offspring comes from Joe, who was in his late forties at the time of our interview. Fifteen years earlier, he had signed on to donate after being encouraged by his girlfriend, because neither was particularly interested in having children. As an engineer, he had no need for the money from donation, and, in fact, he estimated spending more on fast food in a month than he earned at the sperm bank. Years later, after the relationship and the donations had ended, he married a different woman, and they tried to have a child together. “When it turned out the odds were probably not going to be in our favor, there was some resentment. I had done this [sperm donation], and she was not able to get pregnant.”

As an identity-release donor, Joe expressed concern about how his wife would react if the people he referred to as “offspring” contacted him
in the future. This is a distinct possibility, because he has learned that several recipients have had children. “I was actually surprised at my feelings when I found out the first birth had occurred, stronger feelings than I expected, somewhat pride, somewhat joy, probably a smaller subset of what an actual father feels when he and a partner have a kid.” Although Joe distinguished his contribution as a sperm donor from that of an “actual father,” he was curious to meet the offspring, explaining, “I have siblings, nieces, nephews, and so on. There’s always a question of which traits are inherited and which are learned, nature versus nurture, so it would be very interesting to see which traits you recognize.” In fact, his curiosity was quite strong: he had considered moving to a different country to work or retire but put these plans off in part to be more available to meet with offspring who would be turning eighteen in the next few years. At the same time, he said, “There’s also a definite limitation on my part as to how much of a relationship. I have my life. I am definitely interested, but I am also married.”