While proponents of social egg freezing argue that it is liberating for women, opponents contest that the technology provides an individualist solution to a social problem. This article comprises personal and academic reflections on the debate on social egg freezing from four young women studying reproductive technologies. We challenge the promotion of social egg freezing as an empowering option for women and question cultural assumptions about childbearing, the disclosure of risk, failures to consider sexual diversity and socioeconomic status, and the (...) expansion of the market in reproductive tissues. (shrink)

Private cord blood banking is the practice of paying to save cord blood for potential future use. Informed by the literature on corporeal commodification and feminist theories, this article analyses women’s work in banking cord blood. This article is based on in-depth interviews with 13 women who banked in a private bank in Canada. From learning about cord blood banking to collecting cord blood and transporting it to the private bank’s laboratory, women labour to ensure that cord blood is successfully (...) banked. Private cord blood banking involves the overlap or insertion of commercial practices, and relations with clinical practices and relations that may cause tensions and confusion for women and clinical practitioners. Moreover, private banking reinforces and is reinforced by an ‘intensive mothering’ ideology. This article shows that corporeal commodification is not confined to a laboratory and the work of experts but extends into women’s everyday lives. (shrink)

According to biomedical discourse, cord blood has been transformed from ‘waste’ to ‘clinical gold’ because of its potential for use in treatments. Private cord blood banks deploy clinical discourse to market their services to prospective parents, encouraging them to pay to bank cord blood as a form of ‘biological insurance’ to ensure their child’s future health. Social scientists have examined new forms of (bio)value produced in biological materials emergent with contemporary biotechnologies. This paper contributes to this literature by examining the (...) social and technical production of value in cord blood units collected for private banking. Value, in this paper is defined as a socio-cultural concept in which an object is made meaningful, or valuable, through its relations with social actors and within specific regimes of value. I draw on in-depth interviews with women who banked cord blood and key informants in private banks in Canada, to analyze how social actors produced cord blood as a valuable biological object. I show that a cord blood unit holds promissory value for women who bank and profit value for private banks and that these values are folded into each other and the biological material itself. Analyzing how specific cord blood units are made valuable provides insight into the multiple and possibly competing values of biological materials and the tensions that may arise between social actors and forms of knowledge during the valuing process. (shrink)