Routledge releases medical anthropologist Diane Tober’s groundbreaking study of human egg donors this week, cracking open the conversations about IVF, women’s reproductive health, rights to bodily autonomy, and parenting before an important presidential election. Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them is both timely and jaw-dropping in its findings and implications. In February 2024, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) where Diane Tober is a tenured professor, paused in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling which was later overturned. This is the first study to examine the experiences of egg donors.
What happens when people are reduced to products? By pulling back the clinical curtain on the multi-billion-dollar per year global egg industry, that is the central question which Eggonomics seeks to address. Tracing the emotional and physical journeys egg donors embark upon as suppliers of valuable commodities, this book reveals uncomfortable realities at the heart of the industry. Donors ― and the eggs they provide ― are absolutely essential to helping others create the families of their dreams. But not all clinics treat their donors as well as their paying patients, and many donors suffer as a result. Technological innovations allow the egg donation industry to expand, fueling the private equity incursion into fertility medicine, turning once-private clinics into highly profitable, multinational conglomerates. Drawing upon international anthropological fieldwork, Eggonomics reveals the clinical spaces where egg donor’s bodies are tested, prodded, and poked for ever-increasing sums of profit, eugenic forces drive donor selection, and the unrelenting pressures of global capitalism threaten medicine’s prime directive of ‘do no harm.’ Timely, meticulously researched, and written with surgical precision, Eggonomics is a crucial read for researchers, medical professionals, policymakers, and anyone considering becoming or using an egg donor.
Diane Tober is Associate Professor at The University of Alabama, Department of Anthropology, and the Institute for Social Science Research. She is also the author of Romancing the Sperm: Shifting Biopolitics and the Making of Modern Families.
Order your copy of Eggonomics today.