More on the (Gender) Politics of Artificial Insemination

In order for sperm banking to become the multimillion dollar industry that it is, sperm had first to be commodified, and since commodification is both economic and cultural, that is neither a simple nor a straightforward process. As Cynthia Daniels points out in Exposing Men, the book I’ve been reading to prepare for a talk I’ll be giving in April, there are two conditions that must be met before something can be commodified. First, it must be considered “profane” by the community in which it exists, meaning that it can be valued in monetary terms. That which is “sacred,” by contrast, is generally understood to be unique, not simply without price, but beyond our ability to put a price on it. The second characteristic of commodifiability is that the object to be commodified must be “alienable,” meaning that it can be separated from the person who owns it. What Daniels calls “reproductive assets” (85)—sperm, eggs, embryos: and it’s interesting to note that she uses the vocabulary of the market place to talk about this—have all been made to fit these conditions of commodifiability, though not completely. What’s more, the degree of commodification that has been applied to them, she argues, seems to depend in large measure on our notions of gender and the gendered lens through which we view human reproduction as a whole.

It’s not that human beings or body parts are never subject to social exchange. Marriage, adoption, and organ donation, for example, are all ways in which such exchanges take place. Nonetheless, as Daniels puts it, we tend to think of them less as commercial transactions, even when money changes hands, than as incidents of gift giving that “solidify bonds between individuals in a community.” To put it another way, we see these gifts as both existing within and producing social relationships that we actively imagine as absent from the buying and selling of products. So, for example, we generally see donated organs as carrying with them something of the social identity of the donor—not just the facts of her or his genetic/biological makeup and medical history. As a result, we recognize and value relationships that form between the donor’s family and the organ recipient, like, for example, this bride who was walked down the aisle by the man in whose chest her father’s donated heart was beating. Had the heart been purchased outright, the organ recipient would have owned it in a way that rendered the connection to the bride’s father’s identity at least irrelevant, if not entirely invisible.

Even after death, in other words, we do not consider our bodily organs totally alienable. Indeed, we resist it, even as we resist the alienability of ova and embryos and the wombs of people who agree to become surrogate mothers. In the case of surrogacy, the reasons for this resistance are obvious. The surrogate mother’s womb is still inside her body, and the specter of what it would mean fully to commodify that womb—explored in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale—is truly horrifying. In the case of ova, however, the resistance to alienability is a little more complex. After all, people born with ovaries carry many more eggs than they will ever use in a lifetime. So, even though they are not what Daniels calls “a renewable resource”—a characteristic that contributes to the relatively easy commodifiability of sperm—eggs could be bought and sold without at all compromising the future fertility of the person from whose body they were taken. Eggs might not come as cheaply as sperm—they are more difficult to obtain—but price point is not by itself an obstacle to commodification. You just have to know your market.

Eggs have been commodified, of course, at least to some degree, but the fact that there is no such thing as an “egg banking industry”—or at least that we don’t talk about it in such crassly commercial terms—suggests some discomfort with the very idea of buying and selling them. In part, Daniels asserts, this discomfort is rooted precisely in the fact that eggs are not “renewable” and that they are so much more difficult, and so much less risk-free, than sperm to obtain. Taken together, she says, these two realities lead us to see eggs more like body parts than body products, more like the heart of the bride’s father that I mentioned above, say, than, leaving sperm out of it for a moment, the blood that man might have donated to help an ailing friend or relative. Still, understanding the logic by which eggs are valued more highly than sperm does not by itself illuminate the lens through which we see and therefore create that value. It’s here that Daniels suggests gender politics come into play. “[O]va are more likely to be considered more humanly precious than sperm,” she writes, “[because] women are [considered] more central to human reproduction than men….”(87).

This idea, that our understanding of men as peripheral to human reproduction has serious consequences for how we value men and men’s bodies, is central to Daniels’ thesis. “[I]deals of masculinity,” she writes in her introduction, “have skewed the science of male reproductive health and our understanding of men’s relationship” to the perpetuation of the species. For example, she says, “[These ideals] perpetuate assumptions about the superior strength of the male body, [which] lead[s] to a profound neglect of male reproductive health [and has] implications..for how we think about not only men’s relationship to…reproduction but also broader social relations between men and women” (4). Those social relations and the gender inequalities they embody may be in flux, Daniels argues, but the inequalities themselves are also deeply and inescapably rooted in the assumption that “the [reproductive] functions…men and women perform…[along with our assumptions about their relative importance] are beyond social contestation” (5). She goes on:

I am not arguing for a denial of all biological differences between men and women in reproduction—in gestation, lactation, or even the hormonal differences between the sexes—but that these have taken on social meaning far beyond biology….I do argue that men and women are more similar than different in their contributions to reproduction and that assumptions of reproductive difference have been used to justify social, political, and economic inequalities between men and women. I argue that until assumptions of reproductive difference are challenged, gender inequities for both men and women will continue. (5)

Just to be clear, Daniels is not claiming suddenly to have discovered, for example, the Victorian notion of the separation of the spheres. Rather, she is asserting that the understanding of reproductive difference used to justify that notion still informs how we understand human reproduction today; and she is arguing that, despite the progress we have made, until we challenge our assumptions about the social meaning of male and female reproductive biology and function, the same fundamental gender inequities will persist.

To offer one relatively straightforward example that I think is in keeping with Daniels’ logic: Making women more central to reproduction than men, and women’s “reproductive assets” therefore more valuable than men’s, serves the interests of male dominance in that it makes the need to control women’s sexuality a “logical” conclusion. Indeed, an awful lot of the right wing push to roll back women’s reproductive rights and control their sexuality can be read as a push to create a modern version of the “separate spheres” that I mentioned above. In a similar vein, making men peripheral to reproduction gives a logical infrastructure to the sexual freedom men arrogate to themselves in a male dominant culture. By now, the harm such a system does to women is, or should be, obvious. The harm it does to men, however, is less so, until you consider—as Daniels does in the chapter previous to this one—that it has been essentially to protect the manhood to which that sexual freedom is so central that scientists and governments have failed to examine and address adequately the problems of male infertility.

The commodification of sperm, the mere fact that it could be commodified in the first place, is yet one more example of how we see men as peripheral to human reproduction, but this commodification is in many ways rooted in the same desire to protect manhood. Making sperm a product that can be bought outright is a way of erasing the social identity of the man from whose body it was taken, which in turn erases any social claim he might make on the child his sperm is used to produce. His anonymity—and, remember, Daniels is talking in her book (at least so far) about artificial insemination involving couples—protects the fatherhood, and therefore the manhood, of the infertile man whose sperm needed to be replaced. I don’t know where Daniels will take her argument next, but I am curious to see if there emerges from her work a different way of valuing sperm so that it’s “cheapness” is not a source of men’s alienation from our bodies and reproductive potential.

This entry posted in Abortion & reproductive rights. Bookmark the permalink. 

9 Responses to More on the (Gender) Politics of Artificial Insemination

  1. 1
    MJJ says:

    Still, understanding the logic by which eggs are valued more highly than sperm does not by itself illuminate the lens through which we see and therefore create that value. It’s here that Daniels suggests gender politics come into play. “[O]va are more likely to be considered more humanly precious than sperm,” she writes, “[because] women are [considered] more central to human reproduction than men….”(87).

    But isn’t the reason why women are considered more central to human reproduction than men because of the relative scarcity of eggs versus sperm (as well as the fact that women gestate babies?) There seems to be an assumption here that society arbitrarily decides these things, when in reality society usually reflects the biological reality of the situation.

  2. MJJ,

    But isn’t the reason why women are considered more central to human reproduction than men because of the relative scarcity of eggs versus sperm (as well as the fact that women gestate babies?)

    I’m sorry I don’t have time to respond more fully, but I did want to point out that your reasoning here is precisely what Daniels sets out to critique. So, for example, how you understand “the relative scarcity of eggs” depends a lot on perspective. It is true that people with ovaries are born with a limited supply of ova, but they are also born with far more than they will (or could) ever use themselves in one lifetime. So, Daniels would ask, why precisely should that relative scarcity mean that women are more central to human reproduction? Her point is not that biological differences between people who get pregnant and give birth and people who don’t are irrelevant. Clearly those differences matter in all sorts of important ways. Her point is that we have turned those differences, and that we continue to turn those differences, into (ostensibly factual, bottom line, non-negotiable) justifications for gender inequality. Her argument is that we will not achieve gender equality until we undo those assumptions about human reproduction.

  3. 3
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    So, for example, how you understand “the relative scarcity of eggs” depends a lot on perspective.

    Getting sperm is simple, to put it mildly, and manual production has been a common practice for thousands of years, long before Onan’s day.

    Getting and using eggs is only a recent development. (“Using” is crucial here. There’s no turkey-baster method for eggs.) It requires medical intervention and drugs, which have side effects; a longer term commitment (you need to prep in advance of removal); the involvement of a physician; and a physically painful aspiration procedure. And unlike sperm, if you mess things up you can’t just try again in an hour or a day.

    The costs of eggs don’t seem to have changed much recently, and seem to match the difficulty of donating them. That suggests that unlike sperm, egg donation has reached a stable equilibrium, in which there is neither a shortage of available eggs (which would result in higher payouts to would-be donors) or a glut of donors (which would prevent the egg banks from paying as much as they do.)

    Dancing around those HUGE physical and medical differences and the obvious economic results, to try to mostly state a sociopolitical justification for the differences, seems very strange.

    And it isn’t helped by things like this:

    Eggs have been commodified, of course, at least to some degree, but the fact that there is no such thing as an “egg banking industry”—or at least that we don’t talk about it in such crassly commercial terms—suggests some discomfort with the very idea of buying and selling them.

    “No such thing?” Here is a Google search for “egg bank.” There are plenty of them, relative to that scarcity and expense discussed above. And they are discussed in precisely the same terms. Getting those facts wrong in the first place is a bummer, and using “crass” to refer to that is a poor judgment call, if you’re claiming to explain rather than editorialize. (in that same vein, I question your choice of “profane” over such alternatives as “secular” or “non-sacred.” Yes, I know it is is technically correct but carries an imprimatur of wrongness as you surely know.)

  4. 4
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    Edit, see below:

    The costs of eggs don’t seem to have changed much recently, and seem to match the difficulty of donating them. That suggests that unlike sperm, egg donation has reached a stable equilibrium, in which there is neither a shortage of available eggs (which would result in higher payouts to would-be donors) or a glut of donors (which would prevent the egg banks from paying as much as they do.) ADDED: If you were to make egg donation cheap to perform, 100% safe for the donor; painless (or even fun;) quick; and fully non-invasive; then you’d expect to get a ton more potential donors. Do you disagree?

  5. G&W:

    Thanks for the egg bank link. It was careless of me to rely exclusively on the implications in Daniels’ book. Also, “profane” and “sacred” are her terms, not mine. That’s why they’re in quotes and why there’s a page number citation towards the end of my paraphrase of what she says.

  6. 6
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    “profane” and “sacred” are her terms, not mine. That’s why they’re in quotes and why there’s a page number citation towards the end of my paraphrase of what she says.

    True dat; sorry.

  7. 7
    Ruchama says:

    When I was in college, I did layout for the student newspaper, and every week, we’d have at least one or two ads looking for egg donors. This was around 2000, and IIRC, they usually offered at least $10,000. The ads almost always wanted a donor who was athletic, had at least some minimum SAT score, tall, thin, blonde, and no family history of any medical problems. They were usually pretty specific about exactly what height and weight range they were looking for, and it was rare that the height range would include anything below 5’5″.

  8. Yeah, I think I got carried away in extrapolating from Daniels to the comparison of sperm and egg donation that I made here, though I suspect that her overall point, which is that people generally think of them very differently and are generally more willing to accept the commodification of sperm than of ova probably holds true.

    I don’t think, however, that the problems with my comparison invalidate the larger point Daniels makes, which is that sperm banks are largely in the business of selling a very traditional notion of masculinity and manhood and that this is something that ought to give us serious pause for a whole host of reasons.

  9. 9
    gin-and-whiskey says:

    I don’t think, however, that the problems with my comparison invalidate the larger point Daniels makes, which is that sperm banks are largely in the business of selling a very traditional notion of masculinity and manhood and that this is something that ought to give us serious pause for a whole host of reasons.

    I don’t think these facts are entirely correct, either, though I suppose it depends on how you define “traditional masculinity.”

    Take two hypothetical men:

    1) A rugged muscular chisel-jawed 6’4″ poor under-educated cowboy with pectoral quality that is only exceeded by his great medical history… but no tested IQ; or

    2) a somewhat soft-faced mildly overweight normal-mannered 6’1″ Harvard&Wharton MBA with a highly successful career as a stockbroker, a tested 145 IQ, and a great medical history.

    I think “traditional” is #1, but I think that most actual women who are looking for a donor are more likely to prefer #2. They’d rather have a Nobel winner than a gold medal MMA fighter. They’d rather have healthy genes than a strong chin. They’d rather have a good family medical history than a large penis and a Harley. Do you agree?

    OF course there are still preferences, and those probably match tradition. I would bet that all else being equal, a Nobel winner who is a 6’4″ chisel-jawed underwear model in his spare time is likely to get more picks than his short, fat, fraternal twin. But unless women are actually choosing those “traditional” traits like appearance and strength

    over and above

    other “non-traditional” traits like intelligence and education, then it doesn’t seem like a good thesis.