Put Your (Frozen) Eggs in the Bank: Welcome to the Bioeconomy

Emerging reproductive technologies are helping address medical issues that affect fertility and give us more choice when it comes to family planning. But they also risk presenting our bodies from a new perspective: as a commodity to be banked, bought, and sold. 

These social and political implications are the subject of a comment​ary in the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, by UC Davis bioethicist Lisa Ikemoto. She writes that “supply of the cells and bodies necessary for assisted reproductive technology use depends on market thinking and structural inequality.” In other words, the market depends on a discrepancy between rich and poor: Those who can afford to buy, and those who are in enough financial need that they will sell their eggs and sperm.

“The whole practice of egg donation, sperm donation, surrogacy, and I think in addition to that egg freezing not only for one’s own self but as a way of expanding egg banking for others’ use: All that relies on wealth inequality,” Ikemoto told me in a phone interview.

Her piece focuses on egg...