1 Bioethics Beyond Altruism 21the first successful uterine transplantation in Sweden in 2014. Although
the uterus may be regarded as a non-vital organ that an individual
can live without, Charlotte Kroløkke and Michael Nebeling Petersen
argue that in cases of mother-daughter uterine transplants, the uterus
gets positioned as a generation builder, reconfiguring cultural percep-
tions of vitality and the ethical values of uterine exchange as essential
to the privileging of pregnancy and birth as a prerequisite to mother-
hood. In contrast to uterine transplantation as a gift-giving act between
donors (the woman’s mother, a sibling, mother-in-law or a friend) and
recipients (daughter, sister, daughter-in-law or friend) who know one
another, Kroløkke and Petersen show how Danish and Swedish ethical
and media debates frame commercial surrogate pregnancy as exploita-
tive of women who lack a bio-intimate connection to one another. A
core theme of the chapter is the notion of bio-intimacy, which Kroløkke
and Petersen utilise to discuss the way reproductive and transplantation
technologies mobilise body-subjects and, in so doing, create new social
and affective relations.
In her chapter, Geraldine O’Brien discusses the reigning discourse of
organ transplantation as founded on, and firmly wedded to gift-of-life
terminology, a language O’Brien argues has the potential to prescribe the
transplant experience and recipients’ moral reckoning of it. O’Brien’s dis-
cussion is based on qualitative research on the lived experience of heart,
liver and kidney recipients in Australia, who, having received a pre-
cious organ, live in constant awareness that they are being scrutinised
and judged with respect to their worthiness of the gift. In her chapter,
O’Brien shows that the experiences of organ transplant recipients are not
homogeneous and that the medical and health imperatives imparted to
recipients to ‘care for oneself ’ are inextricably tied to discourses around
‘healthism’ and moral responsibility. O’Brien suggests that the ascription
of differing emotional and social values to organs by transplant recipi-
ents, and the specific organ received (heart, liver, or kidney) are power-
fully consequential for the psychosocial experience of transplantation
and the ways in which recipients make meaning of their experience.
Based on three case studies, the chapter by Maureen Coombs and
Martin Woods examines how deceased organ donation practices are posi-
tioned within the end-of-life care in New Zealand hospitals. The authors