scholarly journals ONE DONOR EGG AND “A DOLLOP OF LOVE”: THE BANAL AMBIGUITIES OF EGG DONATION ADVERTISING ON FACEBOOK

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Kant ◽  
Elizabeth Reed
Keyword(s):  
User Interface ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Egg Donation ◽  
Targeted Advertising ◽  
Structural Rigidity ◽  
Donor Egg ◽  
Targeted Marketing ◽  
Structural Mechanisms

Using textual analysis of 28 adverts for egg donation, sharing, and freezing drawn from Facebook’s Ad Library archive, we consider what forms of motherhood, kinship, and sociality are promised through targeted advertisements for Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) on Facebook. We seek to understand (1) how egg donation, sharing and freezing adverts by ART providers represent the women they expect to use their services; (2) how the meaning of these representations is changed by their delivery through algorithmically targeted marketing; and (3) what imaginative, genealogical, and relational possibilities are foreclosed or endorsed in the delivery of these adverts to algorithmically anticipated “fertile females”. Through textual analysis we seek to understand the forms of potential “life” that are present in the advertisements. We consider the representations of egg donation, identify a banal ambiguity in promised post-feminist kinship, and identify the selected families-in-making which might be created by ART. We combine this with a critical interrogation of how and why these adverts are targeted and delivered to certain demographics of algorithmically anticipated Facebook users. The opacity and structural rigidity of Facebook’s targeted advertising systems – structural mechanisms that are binaric in back-end databases and yet “lively” at the point of the user interface - require that we interrogate both media text and computational delivery mechanisms to meaningfully understand what forms of “life” are promised by gender-targeted ART. The genealogical possibility offered through ART is represented with banal ambiguity wherein potentially disruptive arrangements of kinship are derisked by an overarching narrative of simplicity and sameness.

scholarly journals One donor egg and ‘a dollop of love’: ART and de-queering genealogies in Facebook advertising

2022 ◽  
pp. 146470012110595
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Reed ◽  
Tanya Kant
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Method ◽  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Clinical Intervention ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Targeted Advertising ◽  
Commercial Art ◽  
Donor Egg ◽  
Facebook Advertising ◽  
Art Industry

We consider what genealogical links, kinship and sociality are promised through the marketing of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). Using a mixed method of formal analysis of Facebook's algorithmic architectures and textual analysis of twenty-eight adverts for egg donation drawn from the Facebook Ad Library, we analyse the ways in which the figure of the ‘fertile woman’ is constituted both within the text and at the level of Facebook's targeted advertising systems. We critically examine the ways in which ART clinics address those women whose eggs they wish to harvest and exchange, in combination with the ways in which Facebook's architecture identifies, and sorts those women deemed of ‘relevance’ to the commercial ART industry. We find that women variously appear in these adverts as empowered consumers, generous girlfriends, potential mothers and essentialised bodies who provide free-floating eggs. The genealogical and fertility possibility offered through ART is represented with banal ambiguity wherein potentially disruptive forms of biogenetic relatedness and arrangements of kinship are derisked by an overarching narrative of simplicity and sameness which excludes men, messy genealogies and explicitly queer forms of kinship. This rationalisation is supported by the simplicity and certainty of the Facebook targeted advertising algorithm which produces a coherent audience and interpellates users as fertile subjects whose choices are both biologically determined and only available through clinical intervention.

scholarly journals Is Information Power? Comparing Anonymous and Open Egg Donation

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Speier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Czech Republic ◽  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Fertility Treatment ◽  
Egg Donation ◽  
Gamete Donation ◽  
The Czech Republic ◽  
Egg Donor

Both the Czech Republic and the United States are destinations for cross-border reproductive travellers. For North Americans, including Canadians, who opt to travel to the Czech Republic for IVF using an egg donor, they are entering a fertility industry that is anonymous. This makes the Czech Republic different from other European countries that necessitate open gamete donation, as in Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom. For reproductive travellers coming to the United States for fertility treatment, there is a wider menu of choices regarding egg donation given the vastly unregulated nature of the industry. More recently, professionals in the industry are pushing for ‘open’ egg donation. For intended parents traveling to either location seeking in vitro fertilization using an egg donor, they must choose whether or not to pursue open or closed donation. As pre-conception parents, they navigate competing discourses of healthy parenting of donor-conceived offspring. They must be reflexive about their choices, and protective when weighing their options, always keeping their future child's mental, physical and genetic health in mind. Drawing from ethnographic data collected over the course of six years in the United States and the Czech Republic, this paper will explore both programs, paying special attention to the question of how gamete donation and global assisted reproductive technologies intersect with different notions about healthy pre-conception parenting.

Assessment of Egg and Sperm Donors

2017 ◽  
pp. 660-666
Author(s):  
Adam J. Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Health Professionals ◽  
Health Professionals ◽  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Mental Health Practitioners ◽  
Egg Donation ◽  
Sperm Donors ◽  
Health Practitioners ◽  
Niche Area

The assessment of egg and sperm donors is an important area of niche practice for mental health professionals. With the appropriate training, mental health practitioners can offer these much-needed services to prospective parents who are using assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to deal with infertility. Due to the invasiveness of these procedures, as well as their physical and emotional ramifications, many clinics and hospitals require a psychological evaluation of any individual who provides egg donation or becomes a gestational carrier or surrogate. This chapter describes the details of this niche area of practice and how the author developed an interest in it. The author covers its joys and challenges, the business aspects of this area of practice, guidance on developing this niche area of practice, and resources to assist in this process.

Assisted Reproduction in Israel: Law, Religion and Culture

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-61
Author(s):  
Avishalom Westreich
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproduction ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Egg Donation ◽  
Jewish Law ◽  
Sperm Retrieval ◽  
Actual Application ◽  
Conceptual Distinction ◽  
The Right

AbstractThe theme of this composition is the right to procreate in the Israeli context. Our discussion of this right includes the implementation of the right to procreate, restrictions on the right (due to societal, legal, or religious concerns), and the effect of the changing conception of the right to procreate (both substantively and in practice) on core family concepts.In the current Israeli legal and cultural sphere, two issues are at the forefront of the discussion over the right to procreate: first, the regulations governing and conflicts surrounding surrogacy and egg donation, and second, the debate over posthumous fertilization. The first, surrogacy and egg donation, is the typological modern expansion of, or alternative to, traditional procreation. It opens the gates of procreation to individuals and couples for whom natural procreation was not possible in the past (due to medical reasons, sexual orientation, etc.), while, at the same time, it challenges the very understanding of fundamental family practices and concepts, especially as regards parenthood, motherhood, and fatherhood. Part 1 of this composition accordingly discusses the right to procreate, focusing on the regulation and practice of surrogacy and egg donation in Israel.The second issue, posthumous procreation, is an excellent illustration of the expansion of the right to procreate, and a typological example of how this expansion moderates, or even blurs, existential dichotomies, such as life and death. Part 2 therefore discusses posthumous fertilization, with a focus on the debate over posthumous sperm retrieval of fallen soldiers. This debate clarifies the conceptual distinction between an individual right to procreate and a communal, or familial, right to continuation, along with the fascinating tension between the legal system and the social and political atmospheres.On the basis of the first two parts, Part 3 focuses on the dramatic conceptual changes of parenthood definitions resulting from the evolution of assisted reproductive technologies (art) and from the broadening of the right to procreate (both are, of course, related, and influence each other). This part deals with the move from formal to functional parenthood, both in Israeli civil law and in Jewish law. The perspective of Jewish law is a significant player at this field, and it is discussed in various occasion throughout this composition. Part 4 accordingly completes the discussion by providing some description and analysis of the basic Jewish law approaches to art.To sum up, the main argument in this composition is that assisted reproduction in Israel gives expression to and develops the right to procreate. It is a complex right, and therefore at times no consensus has been reached on the form of its actual application (as in the case of surrogacy and egg donation, and, from a different direction, in that of posthumous sperm retrieval). This right, however, despite the debates on its boundaries, is widely accepted, practiced, and even encouraged in the Israeli context, with a constructive collaboration of three main elements: the Israeli civil legal system, religious law (which in the context of the Israeli majority is Jewish law), and Israeli society and culture.

Examining differences in psychological adjustment problems among children conceived by assisted reproductive technologies

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 385-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine H. Shelton ◽  
Jacky Boivin ◽  
Dale Hay ◽  
Marianne B.M. van den Bree ◽  
Frances J. Rice ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Conduct Problems ◽  
Psychological Adjustment ◽  
Middle Childhood ◽  
Psychological Functioning ◽  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Egg Donation ◽  
Adjustment Problems ◽  
Treatment Type ◽  
National Norms

The aim of this study was to examine whether there was variation in levels of psychological adjustment among children conceived through Assisted Reproductive Technologies using the parents’ gametes (homologous), sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation and surrogacy. Information was provided by parents about the psychological functioning of 769 children aged 5 to 9 years who had been born using ART (from the five groups described). Comparisons were made between the different conception groups, to UK national norms and, for a sub-sample of multiple births, to an age-matched twin sample. No differences were found between the conception groups except that fathers from the egg donation group rated children higher in conduct problems compared to other ART groups. No effects were observed by ART treatment type (ICSI vs. IVF, GIFT and IUI). There was some evidence of lower conduct problems and prosocial behaviour among children conceived through homologous IVF compared to national norms. Taken together, however, consistent differences between groups and in comparison to naturally conceived children were not apparent for mother- or father-rated adjustment problems. Children conceived with assisted reproductive technologies, regardless of whether they are genetically related or unrelated to their parents or born by gestational surrogacy do not differ in their levels of psychological adjustment. Nor do they appear to be at greater risk of psychological adjustment problems in middle childhood compared to naturally conceived children.

Re-imagining Reproduction: Unsettling Metaphors in the History of Imperial Science and Commercial Surrogacy in India

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technologies ◽  
Reproductive Technologies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Commercial Surrogacy ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
Travel Industry

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.

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