SPEAKER 1: Let's talk a little about the people who buy eggs.
So how much do they typically pay?
Is there a big mark up, as big as in the sperm side?
What do we know about those people?
How they select?
How they pay?
Those kinds of questions.
RENEE: Again, egg agencies are not unlike sperm banks,
where they want a diverse array of donors
to satisfy any recipient who may walk in the door or click on the website.
So they're looking for women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds,
people of different majors, different life experiences.
And recipients will typically pay-- they're
paying for their own in-vitro fertilization cycle.
They're paying for all the doctors and lawyers and psychologists
who are involved in this process.
The egg donor fee is tacked on to that.
So whatever negotiated fee is decided for that egg donor
based on how many times she's cycled, sometimes
her educational background, sometimes her racial ethnic category.
So again here, egg donation looks very different from sperm banks
in that there is a negotiated price for that particular donor.
Whereas, most sperm banks will really have a price
that they assign to all the donors in the bank.
SPEAKER 1: That's interesting.
And in terms of what women look for in egg donors,
is it different from what they look for in sperm donors?
RENEE: That is a great research question.
I have not seen somebody do that study.
SPEAKER 1: Something in her dissertation topic.
If you're watching here and you're a graduate student,
we're giving you dissertation topics.
So we talked a little bit about the difference between anonymous
versus open sperm donation.
Can you tell us a little bit about how it plays out differently, if at all,
in the egg world?
RENEE: So again, an interesting distinction
is that sperm banks have these formalized,
identity release programs, egg agencies do not.
So egg agencies have a much shorter history.
The first ones were started in the late 80's, early 90's.
And they were just much less focused on anonymity and secrecy.
So to this day, you'll go to an egg agency
and you'll find a woman's adult photo with her first name, sometimes
her last initial.
So there's just much less emphasis on secrecy.
And typically egg agencies were also more comfortable with donors
and recipients being in touch.
It didn't happen in the majority of cases, but it was a possibility.
Where it was never allowed in sperm banks.
So one of the arguments I make in the book,
is that sperm banks have formalized this process in which it's
possible for offspring to come back and meet the donor.
And again I think that's because we think of the paternal line
as somehow more significant than the maternal line.
We haven't instantiated any formal processes for offspring
to meet their egg donors.
And so I think that raises interesting contrasts in terms
of how we think of progenitors.
SPEAKER 1: That's really interesting about paternity versus maternity.
Are there any differences in the attitudes of the people,
the ultimate recipients, so women who use egg donation versus women
who use sperm donation, their openness?
Is there more of a feeling of being replaced
if you're a woman who's had to use another egg
and the child meets that person, as opposed
to a man who's had to use a sperm donor, the other way around?
RENEE: Yeah, so there's a whole interesting series
of studies being done by Susan Golombok at Cambridge University.
And she has a group of postdocs and grad students
who are doing fascinating work with just this question in mind.
Not only for the recipients, how do egg recipients versus sperm recipients
think about that donation, but also for children.
How do offspring of egg donors versus offspring of sperm donors
think about those relationships?
So we'll await the results of those studies.
SPEAKER 1: And again, on this line of paternity versus maternity,
is there a difference in the way in which a sperm donor versus an egg donor
thinks about their role in the family structure?
RENEE: Yeah, this is actually one of the most surprising things
that I found in my book.
In talking with egg donors and sperm donors
about how they think about the children who are out there in the world.
Sperm donors to a person had the idea that they
were the fathers of those children.
They would use kinship language.
They would say, well, they may not have my last name,
but those are my children.
They're my parent's grandchildren.
When I have children they're going to be their siblings.
So they thought of themselves as fathers.
And egg donors who have the exact same biogenetic relationship, right?
They've provided half the genetic material
to create that embryo of that child.
Egg donors were adamant that they were not mothers.
And they would say things, they used the phrase, just an egg.
All I gave was just an egg.
Somebody else was pregnant.
Somebody else gave birth.
Somebody else is raising that child.
So for women, they're really able to partition reproduction into stages,
and say, well all I gave was just this little one part, so I'm not the mother.
Surrogates, interestingly, do the same thing.
Surrogates say all I gave was just the pregnancy.
I didn't provide the egg.
I'm not raising the child, so I'm not the mother.
And this again, I think points to broader cultural norms
around maternity and paternity, such that we don't have that same ability
to partition fatherhood.
You can't say all I gave was just a sperm, I'm not the dad.
Because we have a cultural equation in which providing the sperm
makes you a dad.
And so here, it's interesting to me that our definitions
of motherhood in some ways, are much more flexible
than our definitions of fatherhood.
SPEAKER 1: And this is interesting in some ways,
because the set up of the sperm banks versus the egg agencies,
would lead you to think the opposite, right?
The more it seems like shift work.
I'm doing this three times or twice a week every week,
with less I would think of myself as a father to all these children, right?
But it seems as though this gendered conception of fatherhood,
because there's only one way to become a father, give sperm.
Whereas, with women there are these two separate components.
Seems like it continues notwithstanding the setup of the industry.
RENEE: Right.
Well, and I think the stakes for women are high.
Because if egg donors were defined as mothers,
then they would be mothers who give away their babies for $5,000,
and that would make them terrible mothers.
So the sort of cultural discussions that we have around
who is a good mother, who is a good father, what makes a mother,
what makes a father?
This really plays out in interesting ways, that as you say,
militate against these ideas of who is doing a job, who's giving a gift,
but the gift can-- you can't be too invested in that gift.
SPEAKER 1: And what about the international market for eggs?
How is that look different?
RENEE: So this is changing as we speak.
There is a burgeoning market in countries like India and Spain,
where people can now travel in order to get reproductive services for less
money than they would pay in the United States.
And so we're just starting to see the emergence
of these networks of egg donors.
And again, because our ideas about race and ethnicity get biologized.
We expect those categories to be present at the level of the eggs and the sperm,
then people are going to countries and looking
for services in ways that match their understandings of race and ethnicity.
SPEAKER 1: And lastly, about eggs, I want to just ask you
about the altruistic provision of eggs.
These are people who donate and don't expect to be paid.
What do we know about these women?
How they're different from women who sell their eggs?
RENEE: So again, this is a great question.
The discussions around the sperm donors online have gotten a lot of attention.
I haven't seen as many online advertisements
for women providing their eggs.
I think the altruistic egg donation-- altruistic
is a term that I talk about a lot in my book-- so I'll say,
non-paid egg donation.
I think--
SPEAKER 1: And just to unpack that for a second, why
the discomfort of using the term altruistic?
Is it because there are many different motivations even
for people who are paid?
Is that the main reason?
RENEE: Well, exactly.
I think we have this assumption that if you're paid, it can't be altruistic.
But when I interviewed egg donors and sperm donors, they were being paid,
and yet they also felt that they were helping people.
So part of what I try to do in the book is collapse this distinction.
That the world is not neat and tidy where the altruists are over here,
and the paid folks are over here.
And so I think when we look at how people actually exist in the world
and how they think about the money that they're paid,
it causes us to question those categories.
SPEAKER 1: Great, now back now to unpaid, better term than altruistic.
Unpaid egg providers, you were going to say something about them.
RENEE: So I think where I've heard people talk about egg donors, who
aren't paid, it typically is people's friends or sisters
or cousins who might be willing to provide them an egg
in order to reduce the cost of their egg donation expenses.
Within family donation, I've also heard reports
of it happening in sperm donors.
I don't know that I've seen a systematic study of these kinds of experiences.
But the questions that people raise are, if you're
getting genetic material from somebody in your own family
how is that going to then shape the family dynamics going forward?
And are people going to treat each other differently?
How is the child going to think about who its parent is?
So those are some of the questions that get raised
with unpaid within family donation.
SPEAKER 1: Right, so the idea that you might
be both a genetic mother and sociological and or family aunt
and how to kind of put those two together.
RENEE: And I would say that this is more of a concern for same sex couples,
like lesbian couples.
So, because lesbians don't have some of the same protections in law
in terms of their relationships with their children, a lot of lesbians
do get, and rightly get, very nervous about having a friend provide sperm.
And so often you'll see lesbian couples go to sperm banks with somebody
they know.
The person donates to the sperm bank and that's
providing them some legal protection for their relationship to their child.
So that the man can't come back later and say, oh, yeah,
I actually wanted to be the father.
SPEAKER 1: And later in the course, we'll
actually talk about how some of the statutes
say that if you have insemination done by a licensed physician,
it's treated differently than if it's done at home, for example,
in exactly the way you said.
RENEE: Precisely.
SPEAKER 1: Renee, you've studied this market very intensely.
If there's one or two things you could change if you had a magic wand
and could wave it and change something, what would you change?
RENEE: If I could wave a magic wand and make changes in this market,
I think the things that we could do better.
We could collect some basic data about how many
people are involved in this market.
How many donors?
How many recipients?
How many children?
And sociologically, I'd be fascinated to know in more systematic ways
about their experiences of this market, in terms of kinship,
in terms of payment, in terms of employment, in terms of donation.
I think one of the things that we really need to concentrate on
is this issue of risk.
So there are a lot of people who are going
through IVF treatments, who are being egg donors, who
are freezing their eggs.
We need to know a lot more about the biological and medical effects
of those reproductive technologies.
And then I would say for sperm donors, one of the things
that I walk away from this book thinking is
that we spend a lot of time because of our cultural expectations
of women talking about egg donors and how
this is a really useful wonderful thing that women are doing.
And I think sperm banks can do a lot more
to make this less of a seedy, dirty, funny thing.
And have men think about what it is that they're donating,
and have them consider how they're going to think about it 10 years or 20
years down the line.
So I think sperm banks could do better by their donors
than they're currently doing right now.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you so much for joining us once again.
The book is Sex Cells, C-E-L-L-S. Whether you're in academic or not,
this is a great read and thank you for sharing your time with us.
RENEE: Thank you so much for having me.