While proponents of social egg freezing argue that it is liberating for women, opponents contest that the technology provides an individualist solution to a social problem. This article comprises personal and academic reflections on the debate on social egg freezing from four young women studying reproductive technologies. We challenge the promotion of social egg freezing as an empowering option for women and question cultural assumptions about childbearing, the disclosure of risk, failures to consider sexual diversity and socioeconomic status, and the (...) expansion of the market in reproductive tissues. (shrink)

This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine—the fragmented body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two—are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse the implications of local and global transactions (...) in women’s reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity. (shrink)

Social scientists often lament the fact that philosophically trained ethicists pay limited attention to the insights they generate. This paper presents an overview of tendencies in sociological and anthropological studies of morality, ethics and bioethics, and suggests that a lack in philosophical interest might be related to a tendency among social scientists to employ either a deficit model (social science perspectives accommodate the sense of context that philosophical ethics lacks), a replacement model (social scientists have finally found the “right way” (...) of doing ethics), or a dismissal model (ethics should be abandoned all together as a misconstrued veil of power). Increased awareness of differences in styles of reasoning and objects of research interest might help to overcome the hostility, and an anthropological project is presented as an invitation to a dialogue informed by awareness of such differences. (shrink)

The emergence of a new tissue economy raises issues for the governance of risk and concepts of the body and self. This article explores the development of autologous cell therapies as a form of tissue engineering and considers how and why autologous applications are seen as less risky and more socially and politically acceptable. In a careful analysis of contemporary debates around the need for new international policies to regulate these technologies, we critically assess the discursive strategies employed to support (...) ideas of the body as a natural entity. Central to these debates are assumptions that autologous applications do not threaten the moral or corporeal integrity of the individual and that they are ‘an ethics-free zone’. Analysis reveals that concepts such as intercorporeality need to be refined if they are to assist our understanding of these cell-based therapies. We consider the biopolitics of Autologous Chondrocyte Implantation (ACI) in order to show the linkages between the culturing of cells, regulation and the reproduction of the self. (shrink)

We draw on the concept of dignity to consider the ethics of the disposal of amputated limbs. The ethics of the management and disposal of human tissue has been subject to greater scrutiny and discussion in recent years, although the disposal of the limbs often remains absent from such discourses. In light of the recent UK controversy regarding failures in the medical waste disposal and the stockpiling of waste (including body parts), the appropriate handling of human tissue has been subject (...) to further scrutiny. Although this scandal has evoked concern regarding procurement and supply chain issues, as well as possible health and safety risks from such a ‘stockpile’, the dignity of those patients’ implicated in this controversy has been less widely discussed. Drawing at Foster’s (2014) work, we argue that a dignity framework provides a useful lens to frame consideration of the disposal of limbs after amputation. Such a framework may be difficult to reconcile with the logic of business and the ‘biovalue’ of the medical waste, but would we argue afford more patient-centred approaches towards disposal. It may also facilitate better practices to help mitigate future stockpiling incidences. (shrink)

In the UK, the legal processes underpinning the procurement system for cadaveric organs for transplantation and research after death are under review. The review originated after media reports of hospitals, such as Alder Hey and Bristol, retaining organs after death without the full, informed consent of relatives. The organ procurement systems for research and transplantation are separate and distinct, but given that legal change will be applicable to both, some have argued now is the time to introduce alternative organ transplant (...) procurement systems such as presumed consent or incentive based schemes . Findings are reported in this paper from qualitative and quantitative research undertaken in Scotland in order to ascertain the public acceptability of different procurement systems. Nineteen in depth interviews carried out with donor families about their experiences of donating the organs of the deceased covered their views of organ retention, presumed consent, and financial incentives. This led onto a representative interview survey of 1009 members of the Scottish public. The originality of the triangulated qualitative and quantitative study offers exploration of alternative organ procurement systems from different “sides of the fence”. The findings suggest that the legal changes taking place are appropriate in clarifying the role of the family but can go further in strengthening the choice of the individual to donate. (shrink)

Commentators frequently point to the involvement of biomedicine and bio-science in the objectification and commodification of human body parts, and the consequent potential for violation of personal, social and community meanings. Through a study of UK media coverage of controversies associated with the removal of body parts and human materials from children, we argue that an exclusive emphasis on the role of medicine and the bio-sciences in the commodification of human materials ignores the important role played by commercially motivated mass (...) media organizations. Analysis of the language of news reports covering the period of the organ retention controversies in the UK reveals the ways in which the mass media contribute to the commodification of body parts by recruiting them for use in the manufacture of a media scandal. This is achieved through use of horror language, the fetishization of certain body parts, emphasis on the fragmentation of the body, and the use of a variety of rhetorical devices to convey enormity and massive scale. Media participation in the commodification of children's body parts has profound implications for practices and policies in relation to use of body parts, and has significantly influenced the governmental regulation of science and medicine. The role of mass media deserves fuller recognition by theorists of body commodification. (shrink)

Private cord blood banking is the practice of paying to save cord blood for potential future use. Informed by the literature on corporeal commodification and feminist theories, this article analyses women’s work in banking cord blood. This article is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women who banked in a private bank in Canada. From learning about cord blood banking to collecting cord blood and transporting it to the private bank’s laboratory, women labour to ensure that cord blood is successfully (...) banked. Private cord blood banking involves the overlap or insertion of commercial practices, and relations with clinical practices and relations that may cause tensions and confusion for women and clinical practitioners. Moreover, private banking reinforces and is reinforced by an ‘intensive mothering’ ideology. This article shows that corporeal commodification is not confined to a laboratory and the work of experts but extends into women’s everyday lives. (shrink)

Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising (...) the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism. (shrink)

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is one of the most prominent critics of markets in human organs. Unfortunately, Scheper-Hughes rejects the view that markets should be used to solve the current shortage of transplant organs without engaging with the arguments in favour of them. Scheper-Hughes’s rejection of such markets is of especial concern, given her influence over their future, for she holds, among other positions, the status of an adviser to the World Health Organization on issues related to global transplantation. Given her influence, (...) it is important that Scheper-Hughes’s moral condemnation of markets in human organs be subject to critical assessment. Such critical assessment, however, has not generally been forthcoming. A careful examination of Scheper-Hughes’s anti-market stance shows that it is based on serious mischaracterisations of both the pro-market position and the medical and economic realities that underlie it. In this paper, the author will expose and correct these mischaracterisations and, in so doing, show that her objections to markets in human organs are unfounded. (shrink)

This article is designed to explore ideas in the recent sociology of morality about the conjunction of ethics and embodiment in everyday life. While it draws on an interpretation of the ethical encounter as a relation of moral proximity, it extends this conception of ethics beyond the dyad to include a discussion of gift giving and generosity in the present context. This is done in order to analyse a concrete empirical event in terms of the web of moral and social (...) codes that inform it. The event in question is a well-known New Zealand breastfeeding case in which a woman breastfed another woman's baby `without her consent'. As well as drawing attention to the ethical risks in encounters between strangers and others in contemporary social life, this particular breastfeeding case also brings to the fore the invisibility of breastfeeding as an embodied ethical practice. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to explore human hand allograft recipients’ postoperative experience of disownership and their gradual experience of their new hand as theirs, with the aid of the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Many have used a Merleau-Pontinian perspective in the analysis of embodiment. Far fewer have used it in medico-ethical analysis. Drew Leder’s phenomenologically based ethics of organ donation and organ sale is an exception to this tendency. The article’s second aim is to examine Leder’s phenomenologically (...) based ethics of organ donation and organ sale. Though I find parts of Leder’s approach promising, I also elaborate a line of reasoning that draws on Merleau-Ponty, that does allow us to argue for certain kinds of organ donation and against organ sale—and that avoids some of the problems with Leder’s approach. This alternative route builds on the concept of the integrity of the body-subject. (shrink)

The article’s aim is to explore human hand allograft recipients’ postoperative experience of disownership and their gradual experience of their new hand as theirs, with the aid of the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Many have used a Merleau-Pontinian perspective in the analysis of embodiment. Far fewer have used it in medico-ethical analysis. Drew Leder’s phenomenologically based ethics of organ donation and organ sale is an exception to this tendency. The article’s second aim is to examine Leder’s phenomenologically (...) based ethics of organ donation and organ sale. Though I find parts of Leder’s approach promising, I also elaborate a line of reasoning that draws on Merleau-Ponty, that does allow us to argue for certain kinds of organ donation and against organ sale—and that avoids some of the problems with Leder’s approach. This alternative route builds on the concept of the integrity of the body-subject. (shrink)