Toward a New Gendered Partisanship

This chapter explores and analyzes the role of partisan women in leadership and in setting agendas around the politics of egg donation at the state level. Given the ways that reproductive health, medicine, and family have been strongly associated with leadership and representation by female legislators in U.S. politics, this chapter explains and analyzes the diverse and complex roles of women in politics on egg donation politics and policymaking. This chapter provides the first comprehensive study of egg donation politics at the state level over time (1995–2010), and it connects the divergent policy strategies around egg donation in reproduction and research to the diverse and varied roles of partisan women in state politics.

Framing Egg Donation at the State Level

This chapter begins a response to the questions of what creates the unique system of egg donation regulations by examining the ways that stakeholders—legislators, advocates, scientists, and invested citizens—frame the issue of egg donation in reproduction and research. I explore one policy area of egg donation politics in the United States, compensation in California, New York, Arizona, and Louisiana between 1990 and 2010. This chapter explores and illuminates framing processes about egg donation through explaining the method of policy narrative analysis, case selection, and political contexts in each state.

Dream or Nightmare?

This chapter examines two major frameworks—body and morality politics—that explain the diverse politics of egg donation. At different moments in the history and regulation of egg donation, these frameworks have gained and lost traction to define egg donation in the U.S. context. This chapter breaks down how body politics and morality politics play a role in this process, both in the contemporary period and the past, tracing how they have shaped the system of egg donation. After laying out the ways that these frameworks help explain egg donation in reproduction and research, this chapter connects body and morality politics to the practical, scholarly, and political histories of this reproductive technology in the U.S. context.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes the book by providing a brief overview of the theoretical arguments, data, methods, and findings of this book. I argue that the “lady vanishes” in gender and politics around egg donation, obscuring the importance of political subjectivity of egg donors, as well as the relevance of gendered representation to analyses of reproductive technology policy. In this chapter, I argue for three major avenues of research: egg donors as political subjects, feminist policy and gendered representation, and states as “laboratories of democracy” for federal egg-donation policy. This chapter concludes that through these avenues, the politics of egg donation have a more democratic future.

Statecraft Is Always Soul Craft

To understand the ways that egg donation is framed—that is, the ways that stakeholders define problems, diagnose causes for those problems, make judgments, and suggest policy remedies—this chapter examines the ways that definitions and norms of femininity guide state policymaking across the case studies of California, New York, Arizona, and Louisiana. This chapter analyses legislative texts and bill histories, committee and floor transcripts, stakeholders’ direct statements to the public, local press coverage, and official communications. Three major themes emerge among the case studies: gender and agency, vulnerability, and the moral duty of the state. These themes illuminate the processes by which body and morality politics create a logic of state intervention in egg donation.

Introduction

Egg donation in the United States has been characterized as a “wild west”—there are no regulations that limit the expanding commercial markets in egg donation. Contesting this conventional thinking, the introduction explores how we think about egg donation for reproduction through stereotypes of femininity and how that shapes the politics of egg donation. Laying out the three major themes of this book—body and morality politics, framing, and gender and politics—this chapter forwards the main argument of the book. Rather than seeing the United States as bereft of politics, body and morality politics frames have created a logic of egg donation politics for reproduction and research. This chapter concludes with an overview of the book.