The New Bioeconomy in Eggs: Innovations, Interruptions and Regenerations in the Management of Human Oocytes

Abstract

Since human eggs were first rendered partible from the human body more than 40 years ago, the range of uses to which they have been put has burgeoned. Most notably, eggs provide the foundation of a growing range of assisted reproductive technologies as well as forming the basis for innovation in new areas of regenerative medicine. Traditionally referenced in biomedicine as an exhaustible and inelastic reproductive tissue, more recently human oocytes have been reimagined as potentially renewable, malleable and preservable and as such as imbued with considerable commercial, affective and scientific value. Their exchange and tradability has been advanced via a complex choreography of national and global regulation, new forms of storage and exchange, and changing sociotechnical imaginaries. This panel will consider this shifting post-IVF landscape as it specifically relates to human eggs, and includes papers from scholars working at the intersection of STS, medical sociology, bioethics, policy studies, feminist theory and political economy. We will collectively address questions relating to emergent oocyte imaginaries, subjectivities, politics, ethics and commercial geographies.

Papers address the following themes/topics:

The materiality, extractability and fragmentability of eggs
Egg cryopreservation, storage and banking
Egg economies, new markets and new egg intermediaries
The circulation and distribution of eggs in treatment and research
Eggs and affect: the potential and hope of eggs
Eggs and the extension of fertility
Biopolitics, governance and regulation of eggs
Egg imaginaries and sociotechnical futures
Intercorporeality and eggs: donation, exchange, transfer, sharing

Individual Presentations

• The Reproduction of Race in Virtual Gamete Donation Markets - Erin Heidt-Forsythe, Pennsylvania State University

• Mitochondrial Donation: A New Solution for Infertility in the Reproductive Bioeconomy? - Cathy Herbrand, De Montfort University; Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University

• Institutional Categories on Autologous Oocyte Vitrification in France through Women’s Experiences - Yolinliztli Pérez Hernández, EHESS/Ined

• Egg Banks, Intermediaries and Donor Introduction Websites: Mapping New Agents in the European Bioeconomy - Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University

• Whose Eggs? Controlling the Movement and Autonomy of Human Eggs in the Scandinavian Countries - Charlotte H. Kroløkke, University of Southern Denmark

• Are Egg Donors Patients Too? Eggonomics, Bio-profits, and the Implications for Egg Donor Care - Diane Tober, University of California, San Francisco

Session Organizers

• Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University

• Cathy Herbrand, De Montfort University