SELLING GENES, SELLINGS GENDER
A Comparison of Egg and Sperm Donation

by Rene Almeling

LISTING a child for sale in the local paper’s classified section is unthinkable, and it is illegal for donors to sell organs in the United States. Yet there is a proliferation of advertisements placed by medical professionals recruiting young women and men to sell eggs and sperm to paying clients using reproductive technologies to conceive children, thereby creating a twenty-first–century medical market in genetic material.

In my research, I build on economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s model of commodification, in which economic, cultural, and social structural factors intersect to shape market processes, by incorporating biological factors to construct a model of bodily commodification.

Eggs and sperm are parallel bodily goods, but these reproductive cells are produced by differently sexed bodies. This difference allows for the systematic, comparative analysis of how the economic factor of commodification, the biological factor of sex, the cultural factor of gender norms, and the social structural factor of donation program type (university, medical practice, or commercial agency) intersect to shape the processes through which donors are recruited, screened and compensated in organized donation programs.

As technological interventions into reproduction become increasingly sophisticated, requiring the participation of paid others far outside the confines of the physician/patient relationship, this project examines the structure and experience of the market in genetic material. If a reproductive cell’s origin in a woman’s body or a man’s body determines its status as thing or person, product or service, commodity exchange or gift exchange, then these distinctions shape the economic and cultural value of eggs and sperm, which in turn affect the experiences of the women and men selling genetic material. This dissertation will contribute to debates in the sociology of gender about the relationship between biological differences between women and men and the gendered norms attributed to these differences, debates in economic sociology about how social factors affect the expansion of the market, and debates in medical sociology about the intersection of the market and medical practice.