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Catherine Waldby Sociology and Social Policy THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Oöcyte Procurement for Stem Cell Research: Public Subsidy and the Origins of the Oöcyte Market . Catherine Waldby Sociology and Social Policy THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY. Research Background.

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Catherine Waldby Sociology and Social Policy THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

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  1. Oöcyte Procurement for Stem Cell Research: Public Subsidy and the Origins of the Oöcyte Market Catherine Waldby Sociology and Social Policy THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

  2. Research Background • Catherine Waldby, Ian Kerridge & Loane Skene, ‘Human Oöcytes for Stem Cell Research: Donation and Regulation in Australia’. Industry Partner: Western Sydney IVF. Australian Research Council Linkage Project - • Cooper, Melinda and Waldby, Catherine Clinical Labour: Tissue donors and Research Subjects in the Bioeconomy. (Duke University Press, forthcoming)

  3. Public subsidy for research oöcyte procurement • Egg sharing pilot program in Newcastle-on-Tyne, funded by the Medical Research Council, which gives women who donate research oöcytes a £1,500 rebate on their IVF fees. • State of New York, which mandates up to $10,000 fee for research oöcytes, funded through public or private research grants. • Spain – €1,000

  4. Assisted Reproductive Technology and Animal Reproduction • Artificial insemination (AI) developed during the 1930s, to improve the genetic quality of bovine herds - research on bovine sperm physiology and biochemistry, and on storage and quality control techniques adapted during the 1970s to for-profit private human sperm banks. • ovulation induction was worked out by British and Australian scientists in sheep during the 1950s, and by the 1970s a repertoire of new techniques for oöcyte maturation and superovulation, embryo freezing and transfer were developed to scale up the rate of reproduction. • The trajectory that produced Dolly and the SCNT technique in the 1990s. Human adaptation through IVF.

  5. Beginnings of the US Oöcyte market – social and regulatory context •  The US National Organ Transplant Act 1984 classified oöcytes along with semen and blood, as renewable tissues, and hence exempted from the act’s prohibition on the sale of solid organs. • Public research funds for reproductive science were dramatically reduced during the 1980s under the Regan and Bush administrations because of the political influence of antiabortion groups. Pushed Infertility research into the private sector and put clinics on a for-profit basis. • Federal government was silent on social regulation, primarily because of political anxieties over the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. • A regulatory vacuum

  6. Oöcyte Contracts and Price • What do oöcyte contracts do, is a sociological sense? • ‘who is my stranger in the relatively affluent, acquisitive and divisive societies of the twentieth century?’ Richard TitmussThe Gift Relationship: from Human Blood to Social Policy 1970. • How can human tissues be redistributed between social actors who remain anonymous to one another?

  7. Contract and the US legacy of chattel slavery • In postbellum America contract was above all a metaphor for freedom. ... To contract was to incur a duty purely by choice and establish its terms without the constraints of status or legal prescription. … As a relation of voluntary exchange, contract was premised on self-ownership. In order to surrender rights and accept duties, parties to contracts had to be sovereigns of themselves, possessive individuals entitled to their own persons, labor and faculties • (Amy Stanley 1998 From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. 2 - 3).

  8. To summarise • Ovarian stimulation is a taylorisation of women’s reproductive biology – transforms it into a process for production of a reproductive surplus, which can be transferred between parties. •  Only when it is constituted as a labour process where money is exchanged for durational effort and creation of a product has it been historically possible to constitute oöcytes as a surplus – • Public funds have to match the comparable price point struck by private market negotiations - New York program similar level to Levine’s average and the top of the permissible recommended level of ASRM

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