1 Bioethics Beyond Altruism 19information sharing in relation to donative materials and reproductive
labour in the reproscape bioeconomy. The STS wing of this literature
has sought to theorise the nature/culture divide and the disaggregation
of reproductive biology from its in vivo location and redeployment to
other bodies, spaces and times, in addition to citing gametes, embryos,
the researcher, the laboratory and laboratory tools as co-producers of
new life in this domain.
Because reproductive tissue such as sperm, oöcytes, and embryos
have the potential to create new individuals, rather than saving or
improving the quality of another person’s life as is the case with organ
transplantation, the regulation of biological matter has the potential
to generate polarised bioethical debate. In the first chapter of this sec-
tion, Sonja Goedeke and Ken Daniels discuss embryo donation by cou-
ples who have surplus embryos following in vitro fertilisation (IVF) to
other infertile persons. While embryo donation may offer a solution
for couples who have completed their families, and for those affected
by infertility, it raises significant psychosocial and ethical concerns.
In the New Zealand context, the donation decision and experience of
embryo donation is affected by social and cultural meanings ascribed to
embryos as well as to the donation itself. In Goedeke and Daniels’ chap-
ter, decision-making around storing, donating, adopting and discarding
embryos ultimately depends on people’s understandings of the moral
and ontological status of the embryo, which they flesh out in detail.
The next chapter in the section, by Ruth Fitzgerald and Mike Legge,
draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two New Zealand laboratories
dealing with technologies to assist human reproduction. In the chap-
ter, the authors explore the nature of ethical dilemmas for 14 scientists
whose work places them in close clinical contact with clients who seek
assisted reproduction that challenges the moral perspectives of the scien-
tists charged with providing professional service. Fitzgerald and Legge’s
account intersects with sociological studies of professionals in IVF and
hESC science who engage with ‘moral work objects’ such as gametes,
embryos and stem cells (Ehrich et al. 2008 ; Farsides and Scott 2012 ) as
an unavoidable part of their vocational practice. Rather than bracket-
ing out morality, as scientists are sometimes simplistically portrayed as
doing by the media, Fitzgerald and Legge describe how the reproductive