Experiences of in vitro fertilization donor egg recipients: The impact of technology on reproduction.

摘要

Donor egg in vitro fertilization (DE), first developed in the early 1980s, severs female biological reproduction into genetic (egg donor) and gestational (egg recipient) components. Due to its high cost, in the United States DE is primarily used by white, middle and upper class women. In the media, infertile women who utilize this assisted reproductive technology have been variously caricatured as desperate, irrational, selfish, feminist career women, too old, and/or cause of their own infertility. Yet, amid the clamor of numerous stakeholders, the voices of egg recipients have often been absent. This research project emerged as a means of addressing this silence by listening to and contextualizing egg recipients' experiences as told. Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted with egg recipients recruited for this project through two U.S. infertility clinics (2001--2002) and one online listserv (2003). Political economic and interpretivist traditions in anthropology are drawn upon to frame egg recipients' experiences in broader social-cultural-historical matrices, and to understand how recipients develop and use body narratives as they navigate the worlds of infertility and DE.;DE shares common features with several other procreative technologies, such as non-normative reproduction, public reproduction, religious implications, and issues of disclosure of origins to children, family, and friends. However, DE departs from the experiences of IVF, surrogacy, donor insemination, and adoption in key ways that have framed this research project, including simultaneously non-genetic yet biological mothering, motherhood at a later age, high and highly variable cost of treatment and donor fees, and embodied knowledge on the part of recipients of what donors experience. In their narratives, egg recipients both challenge and accommodate cultural beliefs and norms, particularly regarding age-appropriate mothering, kinship definitions, consumption practices, and the commodification of children. At the core of egg recipients' narratives is motherhood. Egg recipients variously adopt, reject, and reconstitute powerful cultural idioms about motherhood in asserting and normalizing their own status as mothers. Finally, egg recipients' narratives offer new vantage points from which to consider such crosscutting and politically charged themes as "good" vs. "bad" mothers, maternal nurturance and sacrifice, and the contested terrain of fetal personhood.