FIGURE 10.1. Donors’ initial interests in, and current conceptualizations of, paid donation of sex cells.
CHAPTER 10
EGG DONORS, SPERM DONORS, AND GENDERED EXPERIENCES OF BODILY COMMODIFICATION
Rene Almeling
UNIMAGINABLE UNTIL THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the practice of clinically transferring eggs and sperm from body to body is now part of a multibillion-dollar market.1 Hundreds of fertility clinics in the United States offer services from artificial insemination to in vitro fertilization (IVF), and they are dependent on egg donors and sperm donors for clients who do not have or cannot use their own gametes. Tens of thousands of children have been born as a result of such technologies, and the number of people attempting to conceive via assisted reproduction rises every year.
Producing eggs and sperm for sale involves very different physical processes; women self-inject hormonal medications for several weeks before undergoing outpatient surgery, while men agree to masturbate weekly at a sperm bank for at least a year. Nevertheless, women and men applying to be donors are very similar in one regard: most are drawn in by the prospect of being paid. Payments to women in the United States range from a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the characteristics of the donor and the program where she is donating. In contrast, there is much less variation in the rates paid to men; most sperm banks offer around $100 per sample. In egg agencies, staffers draw on gendered cultural norms to talk about the money as compensation for giving a gift, yet sperm bank staffers consider payments to be wages for a job well done. Given that egg and sperm donors are walking in the door for similarly pecuniary reasons, what happens when they encounter the organizational framing of paid donation as a gift or as a job?
By the organizational framing of paid donation, I mean the constellation of gendered practices and rhetorics in egg agencies and sperm banks.2 Women are paired with a specific recipient, and the donation involves a relatively brief but focused period of time in which the donor takes shots, attends medical appointments, and has her eggs retrieved. Thus, even when egg donors do not meet recipients, the idea that someone is on the other end of the exchange is more present, both because staffers talk about recipients more and because women know that their eggs are going to a specific person who has chosen them. In contrast, sperm donors do not hear much about recipients and are not allowed to meet them. Men are also donors for a much longer period of time, during which they make routinized deposits at the bank, more like employees clocking in and out on a regular basis. The underlying message conveyed by these organizational practices—that donation is a gift or a job—is reinforced by payment protocols: egg agencies disburse a lump sum at the end of the cycle regardless of how many eggs a woman produces, while sperm banks cut a check every two weeks (but only for samples meeting bank standards for sperm count).3
The paid donation of eggs and sperm is an example of bodily commodification, a process in which money is exchanged for bodily services or goods. Commodification of the body has long generated heated debates that only grow more intense as the number and kind of goods for sale increase. In tracing the stigma associated with earning money through the use of one’s body from the ancient Greeks to the present, philosopher Martha Nussbaum bluntly summarizes the prevailing opinion: “It is widely believed … that taking money or entering into contracts in connection with the use of one’s sexual and reproductive capacities is genuinely bad” (Nussbaum 1998: 695). An alternative view has emerged in sociological research on markets, much of it inspired by the work of Viviana Zelizer. Pointing to the interactions between economic, cultural, and structural factors, Zelizer’s model of a market “precludes not only economic absolutism but also cultural determinism or social structural reductionism in the analysis of economic processes” (Zelizer 1988: 618). In allowing for the possibility of variation in how markets are configured, and in particular how money is given meaning, Zelizer’s model opens up the theoretical prospect that commodification can have various and multiple effects on those who participate in such markets. In this way, the work of Zelizer and others contests the idea that commodification is inherently or solely detrimental.
In this chapter, I examine how egg and sperm donors respond to variation in the organizational framing of paid donation—as either gift or job—and find that it does have consequences for how individuals experience bodily commodification. Despite the fact that egg and sperm donors are alike in being motivated by the compensation, and they spend the money on similar things, they end up adopting gendered conceptualizations of what it is they are being paid to do. Women speak with pride about the huge gift they have given, while men consider donation to be a job, and some sperm donors even reference feelings of alienation and objectification.
“I’m in It for the Money” versus “Helping Others”
In interviews I conducted with nineteen egg donors and twenty sperm donors from six programs around the country, the vast majority revealed that their initial interest in donation was sparked by the prospect of financial compensation, which is understandable given their life circumstances.4 Most were working but were doing so in low-paying jobs that were often part-time, and about half were also students.
As a result, the prospect of earning thousands of dollars for providing sex cells exerts a strong pull. Megan, a twenty-two-year-old, full-time student who also worked full-time as a clerk, heard Creative Beginnings’ radio advertisement and e-mailed for more information. She explained, “What came in the mail was just their poster. It said what they did, the opportunity to earn up to $5,000, so it would just seem like a lot of money to me. I’ve never had a lot of money all at once.” Later in the interview, she added that “it wasn’t a terrible amount of money. It wasn’t so much that it was irresistible. It was something that I chose to do, because it could help someone else.” Exhibiting a similar ambivalence about being too focused on the compensation, Gretchen, a recent college graduate, said, “This is what makes me feel like a horrible person: I’m in it for the money. Honestly, my car is going to die. The boost in income is going to be nice.”
Men are not so reluctant to identify their primary interest in donation as monetary. Manuel, an undergraduate with a part-time library job when he began donating in his mid-twenties, explained, “As a student, I was thinking of which ways to make ends meet financially. That’s the bottom line. How can I make money without really getting a second job? Then you hear about things like sperm donation, so I looked it up on the Internet. My first step was just calling and finding out what kind of pay do you get? What do I need to do to make this happen? There was no desperation. I wasn’t hard up for money. This [library] job only pays so much, and the extra money could help.”
Dennis, a recent graduate of a prestigious university, did describe himself as somewhat desperate. He was living with roommates and working at several part-time jobs when he finally decided to respond to a Western Sperm Bank ad he had seen many times before. “Looking for jobs on [the website] Craigslist once a month, maybe twice a month, [the sperm bank] puts up an ad that says, ‘Making money never felt so good’ [laughs]. It’s really corny. I kept seeing it, and I was really strapped for cash, so I looked into it. [After-school teaching] was only twelve hours a week, $8 an hour. Not enough to live on. I needed to do something else, so I started SAT tutoring. I just applied for a ton of stuff at the same time.”
About a fifth of the donors started out with a very different motivation: they were primarily interested in helping recipients have children. In comparison with donors who were “in it for the money,” these donors were at a different point in their lives, more likely to be married, have children, and be financially comfortable. They were also more likely to be close with someone who had experienced infertility. For example, Lisa, a twenty-six-year-old mother of two young children, learned that her mother was using IVF to start a new family, which inspired Lisa to donate eggs to a stranger. “I have a tubal ligation, and I don’t want any more kids. I figure I’m young, and I’m making good eggs. I might as well give them to somebody who could use them. I’m just kind of a philanthropic person anyway. I like to donate money or clothes or what have you to different organizations. This is just kind of like the ultimate gift you can give to somebody.” Ryan, a forty-year-old engineer, also felt empathy for infertile couples; he switched from being a regular blood donor to being a regular sperm donor after his wife had difficulty conceiving their daughter.
Three of the sperm donors who signed on to help others are single professionals without children, and they referenced a slightly different version of “helping”: they wished to make their genes available to recipients as an act of charity. Travis, a thirty-year-old engineer, pointed out that he had a large family filled with relatives who lived long, healthy lives. So he considered giving “amazing genes” to “people who are trying to have kids” as just one of his many philanthropic endeavors, alongside blood donation and community service projects.
Earning and Spending
Just as egg and sperm donors express similar motivations for donation, they spend the money on similar things. It is “special money,” in that it is earmarked for particular purposes; just 5 percent of the donors did not have a specific plan for it (Zelizer [1994] 1997). Donors who were initially motivated by the idea of helping recipients were more likely to save the money from donation or use it to buy extras for themselves and their families. A few donors, including two divorced mothers of young children and four single men working multiple low-wage jobs, did use the money to cover basic living expenses. But most donors did not portray their financial situations in such dire terms. About half of the women and men used at least some of the money to pay off debt, as did Dana.
The first time, I was only paid $3,500, and I used it to pay off bills [laughs]. I’d gotten out of college and didn’t have anything, so I had to buy furniture, this and that, and I got it all on credit. So I just paid a lot of that off and then bought stuff for my house that I own now. Every other time since, I’ve gotten 5,000. [The second time] was paying off some more bills and just kind of doing stuff around the house. [The third time] was to pay off Disney World tickets [laughs] that I put on my credit card, and I bought a vehicle. I put a big down payment on an [SUV]. The [fourth time], I paid off bills from my wedding [laughs]. So, I’ve really accomplished a lot with the money.
Egg donors were more likely than sperm donors to use at least some of the money for school, either by paying for tuition or by paying off student loans. Samantha worked full-time as a clerk while also going to college. The money from egg donation was “exciting because that would go toward school. I’m trying to pay for school myself, so that was like a really big help. I just put it in savings, and I didn’t really touch it. Then, each quarter, when they send the billing account, I’d take from it and pay for it that way. When I was almost done with school, which wasn’t too long ago, then I put the rest, almost, not all of it, the rest toward my car.” Budgeting such large payments is probably made easier by the fact that egg donors’ compensation comes in the form of one lump sum.
In contrast, sperm donors receive a check every two weeks, and men were more likely to classify the money as “expendable income.” For example, Fred, a fraternity brother, used it to buy alcohol and food on weekends. Paul, another undergraduate, put what he earned from his other part-time jobs into savings and directed the money from sperm donation to “groceries and gas and usually a little something extra, a shirt or something every few weeks.” Just one of the sperm donors diverted the money to educational expenses.
Being Paid to Give a Gift or Perform a Job
Women and men sign on to donate for similar reasons, and they spend the money on similar things, so it would follow that they would talk about this activity—being paid to produce sex cells—in similar ways. But in fact, this is not the case. Women portray paid donation as a gift, while men consider it a job, rhetorical variation that directly reflects the gendered meanings of money in egg agencies and sperm banks.
Donors’ trajectories, from their initial interests in donation to how they come to define what kind of activity it is, are presented in stylized form in figure 10.1.5 The few donors whose initial interest was sparked by the prospect of helping recipients have children remain committed to this goal. However, those who were initially motivated by money eventually adopt different ways of conceptualizing paid donation, with women making use of gift rhetoric and men relying on employment rhetoric. Only one man called donation a gift, and just three women said it was a job. Two of these three women did so while explaining how they originally thought of donation as a job but now think about it in terms of helping recipients.
FIGURE 10.1. Donors’ initial interests in, and current conceptualizations of, paid donation of sex cells.
Throughout the donation process, as women interact with staff (and occasionally with recipients), they hear over and over that egg donation is a gift.6 In fact, women often encounter this framing in their very first contact with programs, either through advertisements or through conversations with donor managers. Kim, a recent college graduate whose “whole intention of getting this extra money is getting out of debt,” had been matched with a recipient, but she had not yet donated. I asked when she first learned about the compensation. “Well, of course right up front. The way [OvaCorp’s donor manager] explains it, it’s so cute. ‘It’s a gift; it’s a gift’ [singing and laughing]. She’s like, ‘You’re giving a gift, and you just deserve to get something in return for it.’ It sounds so not like, I guess when you just think of it, it’s just, ah, I’m getting money, but she makes it sound like it’s a gift. Very cute.” Describing a similar message from Creative Beginnings, Megan went to the donation program’s information session thinking, “the biggest [stereotype] for me was that you could do [egg donation] as many times as you wanted to, that you could profit on basically selling body parts. At the meeting, I learned it’s more like a blood donation and a Good Samaritan deed.”
The recipient of this gift does not remain an abstraction, because staffers regularly spend time communicating who recipients are and why they are pursuing egg donation. Such information can have a powerful influence on how women think about donation. Carla, a twenty-five-year-old college student with a young child, detailed how her initial formulation of donation as a “second job” began to change during her first conversation with the founder of Creative Beginnings, whom she spoke with after seeing an advertisement in a local parenting magazine.
RENE: What made you stop and look at the ad?
CARLA: Well, definitely the $5,000. That’s why they put it there in bold print. It’s like, okay, I’ll call. Then after finding out about the procedure, going home, talking to my husband, then it was more than just the money. It was safety issues and stuff like that. You go through all the pros and cons. Is it worth it? At that point, it became less of the money and more understanding the recipient, why they’re going through all this trouble. They’re spending a lot of money. Besides just what I get, there’s all the doctor bills and procedures; she has to carry the eggs. That’s what these people are going through. The only way I could relate to that was before I had my son: we were trying to get pregnant, so it was the anxiety, the anticipation, the peeing on the stick. I didn’t have any difficulty getting pregnant, but even the one month, oh my God, I’m a day late, then it’s negative, and just kind of being bummed out, remembering that feeling and sort of correlating it to what they’re going through. So I gotta give it to them. I gotta help them.
RENE: So when did that change for you? How did that change from being about the money?
CARLA: I think it was just [pause]. I talked to [the founder]. I didn’t have many questions, because my mom and dad are in the medical field. But I asked her: “Besides the fact that they can’t get pregnant or whatever it is, why do they have to go this far?” She explained that most recipients are women who are forty and above who don’t actually produce eggs anymore. That blew me away. I had not even thought of that! After learning that, I started changing the perspective on it and putting it into more of a medical need, as opposed to just money. Don’t get me wrong, I took it and spent it. But it became less of a second job and more of an I’m-helping-somebody feeling, if that makes any sense. But it was pretty soon into it, almost from the beginning. Obviously the first was the $5,000.
About a third of the women reported receiving a present after the cycle, either from recipients or program staff. Valerie said that after her first donation at Gametes Inc., the staffers gave her “a little Fabergé egg as a gift. It’s cute. The second time, they gave me a little heart.” Lisa received a postcard from OvaCorp at Christmas saying, “What a Great Gift.” But even women who did not receive a present used the language of the gift in describing donation, demonstrating that an actual gift exchange need not exist for women to invoke this rhetoric.
Alongside the gift talk and gift exchange, women do receive thousands of dollars, and some egg donors deal with this seeming incongruity by referencing the importance of donating for the “right reasons.” Beth, a six-time donor, was a program assistant at OvaCorp, so she was well aware of the fees she could command. But she was not comfortable with “putting a price on it.” Beth explained, “I always let [the donor manager] work it out, whatever the couple can afford. I don’t ask for a number, because that just doesn’t seem right. It just cheapens it. It makes it seem like you’re more interested in the money than actually helping the couple.”
Most significant, though, is the lack of employment rhetoric in women’s discussions of donation. Simply put, women do not believe that being paid to donate constitutes a job, and the presence of monetary exchange is not incongruous with calling donation a gift. Pam, a twenty-seven-year-old nursing student and nanny, explained the distinction between paid donation and a job: “[Egg donation] doesn’t feel like a job. It’s sort of like a process that you choose to undergo, and at the end, you get compensated because you’ve gone through all the trouble. It doesn’t feel earned I guess. I didn’t feel like I was working for a paycheck in this case. It almost felt like here’s a little gift at the end to thank you for the trouble you’ve gone through. I don’t know. That sounds weird to me now that I say it. I think it’s because I’ve never put it into words before.” In “choosing” to help recipients have children and in being compensated for their efforts, women assign meaning to the money in a way that directly reflects the organizational framing of egg donation as a gift, a framing that relies heavily on gendered stereotypes of women as selfless, caring, and focused on relationships and family.
Men, in contrast, talked much less about recipients, did not report receiving thank-you notes and gifts, and did not make distinctions about donating for the right reasons. Instead, sperm donors mirror the banks’ organizational framing in defining donation as a job by referencing the money, the routine deposits they must make, and the necessity of producing passable samples. Mike, who worked at several low-wage service jobs and donated two or three times a week, said, “[Sperm donation is] just something to make some money off of now. I don’t get a whole lot of money from my parents any more, just because they’re going through a divorce and having financial trouble themselves. I’m trying to go to school to be a nurse, too. I have to study a lot, and there’s not a job where I can come and make ninety bucks in half an hour. Anywhere else, I wouldn’t be able to work around my school schedule. That’s why I kept coming, because it’s just a lot of money. I’m, like, a lifeguard, too, and I have a bunch of different other jobs. I make the most money coming here, but I treat this just like I would treat any other job.” Similarly, Kyle described being a donor as “the easiest job I’ve ever had. I put in probably an hour a week, I don’t break a sweat, I’m not doing manual labor, and I make almost as much as working forty-five hours a week loading trucks.”
Sperm donors also relied on the language of the workplace in calling the money “income” or “wages,” whereas egg donors were more likely to call it a “fee” or a “price,” which evokes a one-time exchange rather than steady paychecks. Women were also slightly more likely to use the term “compensation,” which connotes payment for something lost, rather than “income,” which connotes payment for something earned. Additionally, a fifth of the women, and none of the men, called the money a “gift.” These subtle rhetorical distinctions are in keeping with the gendered organizational framing of donation, and donors are consistent with how they use such language. For example, if they described the money as “income,” they did not call it a “gift,” and vice versa.
At some point in the interview, most sperm donors did make a vague reference to “helping people,” but as men are not given specific information about who the people are, the way in which they help is not only abstract, but also gendered: men contribute to the lives of others through paid production, while women help particular people through compensated giving.
Proud Givers versus Alienated Lab Rats
These gendered conceptualizations of paid donation are not without consequences. In concert with organizational payment protocols, in which women are guaranteed a negotiated sum whereas men are paid a flat rate for samples that pass, framing money as compensation for a gift or as payment for a job creates systematically different experiences of bodily commodification. These effects are clear in how egg and sperm donors discussed bodily production, including the extent to which they expressed feelings of alienation from their own bodies.
Both women and men talked about the number of sex cells they generated per donation, but the rationale for their concern with bodily production differed. Men hoped to generate a high-enough sperm count to get paid, and women hoped to make enough eggs to give recipients a good chance at becoming pregnant. Mike, when asked if he could change anything about being a sperm donor, said, “I just hate sometimes when [the lab technician] tells me mine hadn’t passed. Well, I did the same thing! But I just wish we could get money for every time instead of it having to pass.”
Although it was not one of my interview questions, more than half the women reported how many eggs they produced per cycle. But when women raised the issue of bodily production, the focus was not on compensation. For example, Jessica, who had finished her first cycle two months before, explained, “My eggs were kind of slow to mature, and I was kind of frustrated, not at anybody but just myself. I was like, man, I’m going to be upset if I don’t give but about five or ten eggs. You just want to give as much as you can so that [the recipients will] have a chance. Finally in the end, I pulled through, and [the donor manager] said, ‘You’re just a late bloomer.’ So everything worked out well. I was very happy when I woke up, and they’re like, ‘You gave seventeen,’ which is good. I think my friend told me the average is between ten and twenty, so it just depends. But I was glad that I gave a decent number, and it worked out well.” This sentiment, of being “frustrated” and “upset” by the prospect of not “giving” enough, is the logical outcome of a donation process that is structured as an altruistic gift exchange between participants who care about each other, as well as one in which the donor will be paid regardless of bodily output.
Indeed, women were more likely to suggest that they were being paid for the process of donation (time, injections, surgery, and/or risk) rather than the outcome (eggs), while the opposite was true of men. Sperm donors were more likely to say that they were being paid for sperm or, euphemistically, for “samples,” which are the outcome of a donation process that involves not only masturbation, but also abstinence from sexual activity as well as eating healthy foods and getting enough sleep. For example, Fred said he decided to apply at Gametes Inc. after hearing that he could “get sixty-five bucks for samples.” A similar orientation, in which the production of viable sperm is the basis for payment, is clear in Andrew’s response to his mother’s offer to pay him not to be a donor. His mother was not thrilled with the idea of having “grandchildren running around” whom she did not know, so “she sent me a check for $500. I’m like, All right, Mom, I won’t donate for ten times then.’” At Western Sperm Bank in 2002, Andrew received $50 per passing sample. Women rarely engaged in this sort of explicit accounting, and the fact that more than half the men did so suggests that their orientation to donation as piecework results from the sperm banks’ organizational policy of conditioning payment on sperm count.
Sperm donors were also more likely than egg donors to make direct reference to donation as a commodified exchange between donor and recipient. They called recipients “customers,” defined the sperm bank as the “middleman,” or noted that their samples were not “on the market yet.” Women did talk about the recipient’s “investment” of time and money to have a child via IVF and egg donation, but they did not go so far as to refer to recipients as paying customers who purchase eggs.
Ultimately, egg donors spoke with pride about the huge gift they were giving. Heather summarized her experience with egg donation at University Fertility Services. “Giving my eggs to somebody, it’s huge. Being able to look back twenty years later and just knowing that I could contribute to some lady somewhere having kids, giving that gift. The process that I had to go through wasn’t a quick thing. It’s something that I actually had to sit and think about, and it was a process that I had to stick through. I had to stick myself with needles. It was a big memorable event. I mean it’s not like just going to see a movie or something like that. It’s something I chose to do, chose to contribute to some woman somewhere.” In contrast, men did not wax poetic about the significance of sperm donation. In fact, in response to an interview question, about a third of the sperm donors said that giving blood was a more significant form of donation. Paul, a twenty-year-old college student, noted, “There are more people that need blood. It’s more a necessity, you get in a car accident or something, but nobody really needs sperm.” No egg donor came to this same conclusion.
Ultimately, sperm donors referenced feelings of objectification and alienation, describing their bodies as “assets” or “resources” for the sperm bank. For example, Dennis described how an encounter with staff made him think differently about “donating”:
DENNIS: When I had a streak of bad samples, my feeling was: whatever, they don’t pay me [for those samples]; it doesn’t matter. I’m donating here. What’s the big deal? It’ll work itself out. But they were like, “You gotta fix this now.” And that took me by surprise. Oh, am I getting fired? [laughs]. It was the first instance where I was like this is a job. They think of this as a job. You’re sort of like an asset to them, and if you’re not performing, they don’t want to have any part of you. I finished giving my sample, and they were like, “So you’ve had three bad samples. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what the problem is, but you really need to fix this.” I was like, “Yikes. Okay!” [laughs]. Too much pressure there. So that was a major mindfuck. That changes the whole way I was approaching it. Now it’s like you need to perform.
RENE: How had you been approaching it before?
DENNIS: Just very casual. If I don’t come in, whatever. If I do it, I get fifty bucks. But I wasn’t thinking of it like a business, like a business commitment, like a job, which is essentially what it is really. And they purposely make it like a job, because they are running a business, and they need good samples.
Dennis donated at the feminist nonprofit Western Sperm Bank, which he nevertheless defined as a “business” where staffers make donation “like a job,” which results in “pressure” placed on men to “perform.”
Whereas Dennis was originally interested in donation because he was desperately in need of the money, Ben described himself as “independently wealthy” and talked about donation as an act of “charity.” Yet Ben used language similar to Dennis’s in identifying himself as a “resource” that the bank needs. Returning to this theme later in the interview, he stated bluntly, “I felt like a piece of meat almost. I felt like a cow. I’m being milked for something that I can provide.” He concluded that if sperm donors were “really the chief concern, maybe they’d be paid for even the samples that weren’t accepted.” These quotes demonstrate the power of the sperm banks’ organizational practices to shape the experience of commodification in such a way that it induces feelings of alienation. None of the egg donors, who are paid much more money for their sex cells, described their experiences using this same kind of alienated language.
In this medical market, the provision of sex cells for money is framed either as a gift or a job, depending on whether the exchange occurs in an egg agency or a sperm bank. It is the prospect of financial compensation that attracts most applicants, yet egg donors respond to the organizational framing by defining paid donation as an altruistic gift that is motivated by care and concern for recipients who cannot have children. In contrast, sperm donors conceptualize paid donation as a job for which they must show up on a regular basis and produce samples with the requisite sperm count. These patterns are robust; they appear in interviews with donors at different points in their lives, with different financial situations, at different stages in the donation process, and from different donation programs in different parts of the country.
But more than just making an appearance in donors’ descriptions, these gendered meanings of money have consequences. In stoking the connection between egg donor and recipient, staffers make it possible for women to construe their participation in this market as an altruistic act for which they are compensated, which seems to offer a protective effect against other unsavory narratives that could be generated, such as being paid for body parts or even prostitution. However, at the same time, this donor-recipient connection results in pressure on women to engage in the emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) of caring about recipients, hoping that those women become pregnant and feeling guilty if they do not. Sperm donors are not required to think about recipients at all, much less care about them. But this lack of connection, combined with the fact that they are paid based on a bodily performance that is often not up to par, results in feelings of objectification and alienation.
There is nothing inherent in biology or technology that determines these organizational practices or the gendered meanings of money in egg agencies and sperm banks. Egg agencies could match an individual egg donor with multiple recipients, tell her nothing about them, and condition payment on the number of eggs she produces. Sperm banks could foster a one-to-one relationship between an individual sperm donor and “his” recipient, encourage him to consider the plight of infertile couples, and nudge recipients to send thank-you notes and presents. Men could be paid on the basis of process, regardless of the sperm count in a particular deposit, as long as they produced passing samples on a regular basis. But this is not how it works in the market for sex cells, where a woman’s donation is considered a precious gift and a man’s donation a job well done.
This sociological rendering of the market for eggs and sperm contrasts with the traditional vision of a market in which the monetary exchange is all that matters. All the other factors that go into making a market—who is doing the buying and selling, what is being bought and sold, how the money is given meaning, how the exchange is organized, and how the participants experience it—are dismissed as irrelevant. But these factors do matter. The market for sex cells reveals that gendered meanings of money are enormously powerful in shaping the social process of bodily commodification, producing variation both in how the monetary exchange is framed and in how individuals experience being paid for parts of their bodies.
Notes
1. This chapter is a revised and abridged version of Almeling (2011, chap. 4).
2. See Almeling (2011, chap. 2) for a detailed analysis of business practices at egg agencies and sperm banks.
3. Eric Helleiner (in chapter 8 of this volume) can be read as an analogous case of the institutionalization of social meaning, of nationalism rather than gender.
4. See Almeling (2011) for a full discussion of methods. All individual and organization names are pseudonyms.
5. I interviewed each donor once, so this model is not based on temporal data. However, I structured the interviews chronologically, asking respondents how they originally heard about donation and their initial meetings with staff before asking where donation fits into daily life and how they spend the money. In this way, I can compare what originally sparked their interest in donation with how they talk about what kind of activity it is.
6. See Hochschild (in chapter 9 of this volume) for another example of how fertility clinics “teach” women about the meaning of reproductive labor.
References
Almeling, Rene. 2011. Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1998. “ ‘Whether from Reason or Prejudice’: Taking Money for Bodily Services.” Journal of Legal Studies 27: 693–724.
Zelizer, Viviana. 1988. “Beyond the Polemics of the Market.” Sociological Forum 3: 614–34.
———. [1994] 1997. The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.