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Reframing egg donation in Europe: new regulatory challenges for a shifting landscape

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-07-03, 08:41 authored by Nicky Hudson, Lorraine Culley, Cathy Herbrand, Vincenzo Pavone, Guido Pennings, Veerle Provoost, Katie CoveneyKatie Coveney, Sara Lafuente Funes
The first birth from a donated egg was reported in Australia in 1984, ushering in a new era of possibilities for the treatment of infertility (1). Since then egg donation has undergone a number of technical, regulatory and commercial transformations. Its use by a growing and diverse range of social groups and more recently the dawn of advanced freezing technologies, have reconfigured the process. Given the transformation in its organisation and practice, there is a pressing need to map these changes in finer detail and to ask critical questions about the continued fit of existing policy and regulation in this rapidly developing landscape of fertility medicine. In this paper we present a ‘critical reflection’ (2) on developing practices in egg donation, which we suggest are reshaping the character of egg donation as well as raising questions regarding their implications for policy. We highlight a number of policy ‘blind-spots’ relating specifically to information giving and informed consent for egg providers, the emergence and entry of a range of intermediaries and a shift towards certain practices which may see eggs increasingly treated as tradable commodities. We call for a re-contextualising of the debate on egg donation and for renewed attention to the new political economy of egg donation in Europe.

Funding

Economic and Social Research Council (REF: ES/N010604/1).

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Health Policy and Technology

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Health Policy and Technology and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hlpt.2020.04.007.

Acceptance date

2020-04-20

Publication date

2020-05-19

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

2211-8837

eISSN

2211-8845

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Katie Coveney. Deposit date: 2 July 2020

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