Professor Catherine Waldby, Professorial Future Fellow, The University of Sydney
Larry Saha Room (HA2175), Haydon Allen Building #22, The Australian National University

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, IVF procedures allow one woman to donate her oocytes (eggs) to another, and so enable women with poor fertility to conceive. As IVF treatment becomes more and more common and global, the demand for fertile oocytes has expanded dramatically. However different jurisdictions adopt widely different approaches to regulation, ranging from complete prohibition (e.g. Germany), through strictly altruistic gifting (e.g. Australia), to regulated and unregulated markets (e.g. Spain and USA). As a consequence, oocytes have acquired enormous scarcity value and developed a complex social and economic life. The ways they are produced, circulated and negotiated has become an important dynamic in considering the ways reproductive capacities are distributed and biomedically enhanced, and the ways power relations between different groups of women play out.

In this paper, I will present some fieldwork from my Future Fellowship involving interviews with Australian and British women who have travelled overseas to purchase oocytes. Like the more notorious practice of international surrogacy, this kind of fertility tourism allows women and couples to circumvent regulations and obtain kinds of third party fertility services that may be illegal in their resident jurisdiction. I will focus in particular on the ways the women negotiate the issue of the donor’s legal and biological identity in the process of assisted family formation. I will discuss the imperative to ‘match’ the donor with the recipient, and hence to conceal the donation, and the emergence of an alternative ethic that publically celebrates the trace of the donor in the formation of a ‘rainbow’ family.