Dear list members

The Gender Center of Meiji University School of Information and Communication holds a public seminar on transnational egg donation, a topic related to transnational medical tourism, medicalization of the body, new reproductive technology, ethics, and gender.

URL:
http://www.meiji.ac.jp/infocom/gender/info/2013/6t5h7p0
0000ethi1.html
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Meiji University School of Information and Communication Gender Center Seminar Series 2013, #1

Ethics on Eggs: Feminist Analyses of Transnational Egg Donation

Charlotte Kroløkke, Ph.D., University of Southern Denmark

Date: Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Time: open at 17:10, start at 17:30
Venue: Meiji University, Surugadai Campus, Liberty Tower 9F, Room 1094 No registration necessary. Lecture in English.

Abstract:
Fertility travel is a global and emergent topic. While Italians, Swedes, and Norwegians travel to Denmark for anonymous sperm donation, Danes travel to Spain or the Czech Republic for egg donation, yet others go to the Ukraine or India for transnational surrogacy. In the case of egg donation, long waiting lists and age restrictions are prime motivations for infertile women to leave Denmark and travel internationally. In contrast to the Danish legal and ethical frameworks, a liberal political framework enables Spanish clinics to offer egg donors higher compensation rates and to offer intended parents phenotype matching and cutting-edge reproductive technology including high pregnancy success rates. In the presentation, I first juxtapose and present the Danish and Spanish legal and ethical frameworks. In Denmark altruism mixes with gender equality. Meanwhile, discourses on the right to mother and altruism are dominant in the Spanish legal and ethical setting. I, then, examine how ethics on egg donation is discursively and affectively constructed in the U.S.
produced movie eggsploitation and I contrast this with the ways in which ethics is managed and negotiated by couples travelling transnationally for egg donation, by the clinical staff in one Spanish fertility clinic, as well as in the marketing of egg donation in Spain as an altruistic practice.

Speaker's Bio:
Charlotte Kroløkke is Associate Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
Kroløkke's research interests are in new reproductive technologies and feminist communication studies. She is currently working on the transnational flow and migration of bodies and biogenetic material with a particular research interest in egg donation in Spain and surrogacy in India. Charlotte has published various articles on fertility travel, egg donation, and surrogacy. She is head of the collective research project (Trans)formations of kinship: Travelling in search of relatedness (KinTra). For further information on this
project:
http://www.sdu.dk/en/Om_SDU/Institutter_centre/Ikv/Fors
kning/Forskningsprojekter/KinTra