Reproductive Racism in Danielle Evans’s “Harvest:” Black, Chicana, and White Motherhoods in the Context of Reproductive Rights Discourses

The paper explores the short story “Harvest” (2010) by African American writer Danielle Evans and traces the figurations of the racialized aspects of gender in “Harvest” within the theoretical frameworks of Black and Chicana feminisms, motherhood studies, and intersectionality. After situating the Black and Chicana characters’ anxieties around egg donation in the historical context of reproductive rights, economics, and the politicization of Black and Chicana women’s bodies, I discuss how the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class impact the racialized gender identity of especially the Black protagonist and to a smaller extent that of her Chicana and white friends as well. I argue that the current practices of egg donation depicted in the story are imbricated in the wider system of racial capitalism that values women’s childbearing capacities differentially in terms of their race.

Fertility Counseling in Survivors of Cancer in Childhood and Adolescence: Time for a Reappraisal?

Genetic predisposition could have an important role in the pathogenesis of cancers in children and adolescents. A recent study by our group showed that, among female survivors of cancers in childhood and adolescence, the proportion of cases involving a possible genetic predisposition was sizable (at least one in five). Our sample is too small to be representative of the general population, but it gave us an opportunity to reappraise this issue. Women with a genetic predisposition can transmit the risk of cancer to their offspring, and their awareness of this may influence their reproductive and fertility preservation choices. In our experience, a predisposition to cancer receives little attention in the fertility counseling and decision-making process unless a patient already has a definitive molecular diagnosis of a hereditary cancer syndrome. We feel it is essential to empower women on this issue, particularly as there are ways to overcome the problem, including preimplantation genetic testing (PGT-M) in definitively diagnosed cases, egg donation and adoption. In the context of fertility counseling for survivors of cancer in childhood and adolescence who have reached adulthood, the risk of transmitting a predisposition to cancer should be discussed with patients, if relevant and desired.

Egg Donation in Art. Legal and Logical Arguments

"The procuring of eggs and compensatory measures for donors today present unresolved ethical and conceptual issues, which fuel the growth of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry. The speech proposes a problematization of the phenomenon from a legal point of view, supported by a rhetorical-argumentative analysis of the legal institutions. The legal provision of oocytes admits the only donation. It was deduced by analogy from the legislative provisions of available of organs and tissues (law no. 458 of 1967; law no. 301 of 1993; law no. 91 of 1999; law no. 483 of 1999), which provides for the balance between impairment of the psycho-physical sphere and goods that benefit from it. Is this balance comparable to the available of oocytes? Or does it need an autonomous redefinition? The various national regulations show that in Europe the term donation includes not only solutions of substantial gratuity, but also various forms of compensation. On one side this shows the fragility of the definition of donation, rhetorically constructed through the Aristotelian argument of the dissociation between reimbursement and remuneration, and on the other it makes clear the need to use logical-argumentative tools to disclose the criterion of hierarchization of values in game. It remains to be understood how ethical reflection, led by an argumentative legal analysis, can provide the tools to improve the functioning of a system that seems to render donors’ rights unfit for use. "