In the course of preparing remarks for an upcoming roundtable, I was searching back through my old posts and came across this still-relevant blast from the past, How Is An Egg Donor Like A Prostitute? My views remain unchanged, some 15 years later:*
As I argue in the recently posted, A Woman’s Worth, an egg donor is much like a prostitute in the following sense: both are selling something that is often expected or encouraged to be given for free or at a reduced price, despite its high economic value.
Like many taboo markets, the markets for sex and oocytes present a paradox. These robust commercial industries attract large numbers of suppliers and consumers, yet continue to be regarded as socially problematic—perhaps deviant or repugnant—and in need of strict controls. Even when legal, taboo markets and those who supply them may be stigmatized, like the prostitute, or, like the egg donor, romantically recharacterized as an altruistic nonmarket transactor whose economic exchange is limited in ways that other markets are not. I contend that these tendencies are often the product of unexamined instincts and are laden with class and gender prejudices and anxiety about the body, especially women’s bodies, that have little relation to the stated objections to the underlying transaction.
But I also came across this post from co-blogger, Bridget Crawford, making a similar point about selling hair. Of course this post, "Ten Ways Surrogacy is Like Prostitution," from 2018 provides the more typical comparison of reproductive labor to sexual labor. Though I was purposely searching for older posts to demonstrate the long-standing nature of this rhetorical tactic, inevitably designed to cause the reader to judge both sexual and reproductive labor in a negative light, this type of argument is alive and well. (Which is why I was looking for it again, all these years later)
*Have I really been blogging that long?? Good grief!
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