Join us on April 18 at UC Berkeley for a talk by Prof. Diane Tober about her new book, Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them. The talk will be facilitated by Prof. Osagie Obasogie.
Light refreshments will be served in the foyer outside the colloquia room.
Sponsors: OBI Health Disparities Cluster and Center for Genetics and Society
Access needs: to request CART captioning or ASL contact Charlotte O'Keefe Stralka (charlotte.okeefe@berkeley.edu) at least 10 days before the event
About the speaker:
Dr. Diane Tober is an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. Her work focuses on reproductive donation in the US and around the world. She has been conducting research exploring egg donors’ decisions and experiences within the global market for human eggs since 2013, focusing on the commodification of human genetic material, health and well-being of oocyte donors, and meanings of family and kinship within the context of gamete donation. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she is conducting research comparing the biomedical markets of egg donation in the United States and Spain. Her book, Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families (2018), explores the intersections between the sperm banking industry, the men who provide sperm, and the single women and lesbian couples who use donor sperm to conceive a child. She earned a BA in anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her MA in anthropology at University of Hawaii, Manoa, and her PhD in medical anthropology from the joint University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco medical anthropology program.
About the book:
What happens when people are reduced to products? By pulling back the clinical curtain on the multi-billion-dollar per year global egg industry, that is the central question Eggonomics seeks to address. Tracing the emotional and physical journeys egg donors embark upon as suppliers of valuable commodities, this book reveals uncomfortable realities at the heart of the industry. Donors — and the eggs they provide — are absolutely essential to helping others create the families of their dreams. But not all clinics treat their donors as well as their paying patients, and many donors suffer as a result. Technological innovations allow the egg donation industry to expand, fueling the private equity incursion into fertility medicine, turning once-private clinics into highly profitable, multinational conglomerates. Drawing upon international anthropological fieldwork, Eggonomics reveals the clinical spaces where egg donor’s bodies are tested, prodded, and poked for ever-increasing sums of profit, eugenic forces drive donor selection, and the unrelenting pressures of global capitalism threaten medicine’s prime directive of ‘do no harm.’ Timely, meticulously researched, and written with surgical precision, Eggonomics is a crucial read for researchers, medical professionals, policymakers, and anyone considering becoming or using an egg donor.
