In her new book, “Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm,” Yale sociologist Rene Almeling, explores the brave new world of assisted reproduction and the rapidly growing trade in gamete cells that it has spawned. While offering an extended overview of the industry, Almeling focuses particularly on the gender biases of the sperm and egg agencies that solicit and remunerate donations of the market’s chief commodity.
Most men and women enter into the original transaction of selling their gamete cells simply to earn money, according to Almeling’s study. However, how these “donors”—as they are known in the trade—perceive their roles as gamete providers after making their first contribution is largely determined by the sperm banks and fertility clinics that recruited them, Almeling holds. The agencies encourage men to think of their earnings as wages for an easy job, while women, who are more highly paid for the medically invasive procedure of harvesting eggs, are urged to think of their donation in altruistic terms, that is, helping infertile couples.
“Throughout the donation process as women interact with staff, and occasionally with recipients, they hear over and over that egg donation is a gift,” writes Almeling. They are also urged to think about the individuals whose lives they are enriching through their donation, she reports.
Men, by contrast, who are only paid for an individual donation if the sperm count is high enough to be viable, are not encouraged to follow up on possible offspring. “Identity release” programs recently adopted by some sperm banks, only permit offspring to find out about their biological fathers, not vice versa.
Paradoxically, though, as Almeling reports, sperm donors think of themselves as “fathers” of future offspring, while women donors do not identify themselves as “mothers.” Whether egg donors or surrogates who are paid to carry the embryo to term, most women agree that the “true” mother is the person who nurtures and raises the child.
While this is partly explained by innate biological differences and the fact that assisted reproduction allows maternity to be partitioned into discrete phases, Almeling argues that the reluctance of egg donors to identify as “mothers” is, rather, an outcome of social conditioning and the gendered-biased marketing of infertility clinics.
In “Sex Cells,” the author builds the case that the uniquely American commodification of reproduction both exploits and reinforces cultural standards of masculinity and femininity, fatherhood and motherhood.