1 Bioethics Beyond Altruism 11(Dickenson 2008 ); the immortalisation of the HeLa cell line, named
after Henrietta Lacks (Skloot 2010 ); the patent granted to the Miami
Children’s Hospital and Dr Matalon for the Canavan registry that was
co-founded by a patient organisation (Novas 2006 ); and the informal
exchange between scientists from different institutions of cryogenically
stored samples of brain tissue for research purposes, as discussed by
Bronwyn Parry ( 2007 ). Likewise, Waldby and Cooper ( 2008 : 69) docu-
ment the solicitation of oöcytes purely for biomedical research by stem
cell enterprises in the USA. Unlike the NESR scheme Erica Haimes
discusses, the US egg providers are not undergoing fertility treatment,
but are still framed as altruistic donors even though they are financially
compensated for their eggs.
On the flip side, feminist scholars in the social sciences studying
assisted reproduction have also challenged altruistic narratives around
reproductive gift-giving, arguing that women who donate ovarian eggs
or who act as gestational and traditional surrogates do not always have
supererogatory reasons for doing so, but see the provision of oöcytes
as a form of other-regarding body project (Almeling 2009 , 2011 ;
Shaw 2008b; Thompson 2005 ). Charlotte Kroløkke ( 2015 , 2016 ) has
investigated the cross-cutting motivations of transborder egg providers,
who not only assist others to build families, but travel for free to an
exotic holiday destination where the fertility clinic is based, in addition
to receiving compensation for their donative efforts. Similar to the stem
cell treatments discussed in the chapters this volume, assisted repro-
duction in the global context is bound up with forms of medical travel
that mean the desire and hope for the promise of a child, or health and
longevity in the case of stem cell therapy, is intertwined with commerce.
Following Viviana Zelizer ( 1997 , 2011 ), who has argued that people
regularly imbue their donative acts with moral intent even where the
introduction of market relations is involved, these commentators show
how the transactions they document are entangled in social relations
of moral and economic value. This research demonstrates the extent
to which the circulation of bodily materials does not readily fit either a
pure gift or pure market exchange model, but occupies a liminal space
or ‘grey zone’ (Lundin et al. 2016 ) between acts of donation and gift,
and compensation and market commodification.