There has been a troublesome anomaly in the UK between cash payment to men for sperm donation and the effective assumption that women will pay to donate eggs. Some commentators, including Donald Evans in this journal, have argued that the anomaly should be resolved by treating women on the same terms as men. But this argument ignores important difficulties about property in the body, particularly in relation to gametes. There are good reasons for thinking that the contract model and payment (...) for gametes are both inappropriate, and that a model based on altruism should be applied to both sexes. (shrink)

There is an urgent need for reconstructing models of property to make them more women-friendly. However, we need not start from scratch: both ‘canonical’ and feminist authors can sometimes provide concepts which we can refine and apply towards women’s propertylessness. This paper looks in particular at women’s alienation from their reproductive labour, building on Marx and Delphy. Developing an economic and political rather than a psychological reading of alienation, it then considers how the refined and revised concept can be applied (...) to concrete examples in global justice for women: in particular, the commercialisation of embryonic and fetal tissue in the new stem cell technologies. (shrink)

: This essay examines the increasing commodification of the body with respect to tissues, gametes, and embryos. Such commodification contributes to a diminishing sense of human personhood on an individual level, even as it erodes commitments to human flourishing at the societal level. After the case for social harm resulting from the increasing commodification of the body is made, the question becomes whether that harm is best remedied by following any of three approaches by which government traditionally seeks to promote (...) the flourishing of its citizens. The author concludes that it is not, and that what is needed is a pragmatic and somewhat casuistic approach to the regulation of contested commodities--that which legal scholar Margaret Jane Radin calls "incomplete commodification.". (shrink)

One effect of late capitalism – the commodification of practically everything – is to knock down the Chinese walls between the natural and productive realms, to use a Marxist framework. Women's labour in egg extraction and ‘surrogate’ motherhood might then be seen as what it is, labour which produces something of value. But this does not necessarily mean that women will benefit from the commodification of practically everything, in either North or South. In the newly developing biotechnologies involving stem cells, (...) the reverse is more likely, particular given the shortage in the North of the egg donors who will be increasingly necessary to therapeutic cloning.Although most of the ethical debate has focused on the status of the embryo, this is to define ethics with no reference to global or gender justice. There has been little or no debate about possible exploitation of women, particularly of ovum donors from the South. Countries of the South without national ethics committees or guidelines may be particularly vulnerable: although there is increasing awareness of the susceptibility of poorer countries to abuses in research ethics, very little has been written about how they might be affected by the enormously profitable new technologies exploiting human tissue. Even in the UK, although the new Medical Research Council guidelines make a good deal of the ‘gift relationship’, what they are actually about is commodification. If donors believe they are demonstrating altruism, but biotechnology firms and researchers use the discourse of commodity and profit, we have not ‘incomplete commodification’ but complete commodification with a plausibly human face. (shrink)

: This response to the preceding five articles highlights the stubborn persistence of the philosophical perplexities surrounding commodification in the realm of medicine and biotechnology.

: he commercialization of biotechnology, especially research and development by transnational pharmaceutical companies, is already excessive and is increasingly dangerous to distributive justice, human rights, and access of marginal populations to basic human goods. Focusing on gene patenting, this article employs the work of Margaret Jane Radin and others to argue that gene patenting ought to be more highly regulated and that it ought to be regulated with international participation and in view of concerns about solidarity and the common good. (...) The mode of argument called for on this issue is more pragmatic than logical, emphasizing persuasion based on evidence about the reality and effects of control of genetic research by profit-driven biotech companies. (shrink)