Put Your (Frozen) Eggs in the Bank: Welcome to the Bioeconomy
By Victoria Turk,
Motherboard
| 02. 23. 2015
[Quotes CGS Fellow Lisa Ikemoto]
Untitled Document
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 commentary 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...
Related Articles
By Miranda Bryant, The Guardian | 08.27.2025
Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, has apologised for the first time for the forced contraception scandal in which thousands of Greenlandic girls and women were fitted with contraceptive coils without their permission or knowledge.
Describing it as “systemic discrimination” against...
By Caroline Kitchener, The New York Times | 08.21.2025
Less than two weeks after an Alabama Supreme Court decision upended in vitro fertilization in the state and prompted a national backlash, over 100 conservative congressional staff members and I.V.F. skeptics crammed into a meeting room a few blocks from...
By Carter Sherman, The Guardian | 08.23.2025
For Erica L and her husband, in-vitro fertilization was the “nuclear option”.
After two years of trying to conceive, Erica and her husband had no idea why they could not have a baby. Doctors said only that they had “unexplained...
By Riley Beggin and Jeff Stein, The Washington Post | 08.03.2025
The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.
Last...