Chapter 6: Ageing Eggs, Ageless Mothers? Egg Donation and the Extension of Fertility

Originally from Switzerland, Jessica worked for years as a medical assistant in assisted reproductive technology (ART) clinics in Spain. She had recently returned to her country and was looking for a new job when I met her. I discovered her work and contacted her through a website providing support and assistance to ART patients turning to clinics abroad in order to have a child. She started our discussion by making clear that the website was closed and that she was not providing this kind of service in exchange for money, but only to help friends. Having worked on one of the European platforms for egg donation programmes, she expressed repeatedly how restricted, fearful and even inhumane she found the situation for ART in Switzerland, ‘where everything is prohibited’ (Jessica, interview 27.06.2011) and especially egg donation. During the interview, Jessica frequently insisted on the beauty of the altruistic gesture of providing oocytes and on the liberating and empowering dimension of using donated eggs for those women who most impressed her whom she described as ‘not having any man, or woman in their lives, who know exactly what they want, who travel, who are intelligent, who speak several languages’. Interestingly, ageing oocytes were not presented as the main obstacle to the success of ARTs, similarly to what I had noticed in interviews with Swiss clinicians and patients, but the endometrium – the mucous membrane lining the uterus which thickens for the implantation of an embryo – was the most difficult part to handle for her: ‘We don't need tubes. We don't need oocytes [from the patient]. But without a good endometrium, we cannot do anything’ (Jessica, interview 17.06.2011). The way the decline of the ovarian reserve was not presented as significant in the success or failure of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) caught my attention and led me to question its relationship with the use of fertility extension technologies such as egg donation when they become a normalised component of clinical choreographies.