Selecting women, taming bodies? Body ontologies in egg donation practices in Spain

Abstract

According to the Spanish law of assisted reproduction, women intending to donate eggs must be “in good psychophysical health” and “do not suffer from genetic or infectious hereditary diseases transmissible to the offspring” (chapter II, article 5). What a “good” psychophysical health condition is, what the “transmissible diseases” are, and what counts as disease at all remains contested. In this paper, we explore how these broad legal criteria materialize through different tests and selection procedures. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Spanish fertility clinics and with egg donors in Spain, we argue that selection and management procedures are organized to split egg donors as “multiple bodies” (Mol 2002), which will have to be tamed in different ways. On the one hand, we will refer to the making of a “biographical subject,” for which we understand the donor to be a conscious autonomous subject. And on the other hand, we refer to the “body object,” for which we understand the donor to be a terrain of potential extractability. As we argue, clinics aim to select a responsible biographical subject who kindly obeys professionals’ instructions throughout the process in order to make the body object accessible to clinics’ extraction purposes. To conclude, our paper sheds light on issues of “reproductive in/justice” by discussing how the reproductive rights of intended parents through egg donation are entangled with inequalities of egg donors.