Bioethics Blogs

Why Facebook

Three white chicken eggs with smiley faces drawn on them peer out at me from a Facebook ad. (Notably, a Facebook ad forwarded to a listserv by a young woman in college, not one that popped up in my own middle-aged Facebook feed.) One of the smiling eggs exclaims, “Donate Me and Help Make a Family!&rdquo;

Fifteen or twenty years ago, this ad would have made little sense. Donate a chicken egg to create a family? But in today&rsquo;s brave new reproductive world, where&nbsp;in-vitro&nbsp;fertilization, commercial surrogacy, and sperm and egg donation are no longer obscure medical secrets but commonplace knowledge, it&rsquo;s fairly obvious to most people viewing this ad that it is targeted at young women, encouraging them to “donate&rdquo; their ova.

I put the word “donate&rdquo; in quotes above because unlike kidneys, ova are not usually “donated&rdquo; in this country. While it is illegal to offer economic compensation to people for other sorts of organ donation (due, rightfully, to the bioethical concern that this will create a market for human organs, and impoverished people will be unequally coerced into selling their body parts), getting paid for giving up your ova (and sperm) is perfectly legal in the U.S.

But why is it particularly worrisome that ads for ova donation have made it onto personalized Facebook feeds?

The Commodification of Women&rsquo;s Bodies: Economic Coercion

Back when the only egg donation ads I saw were in the hallways of the Ivy League medical school in which I teach, I was equally concerned. Whether on digital or brick-and-mortar walls, ova donation ads make clear that women&rsquo;s bodies and body parts are commodities to be bought and sold.
