Shelling Out: Eugenic Afterlives in Egg Donation Advertising in Two Elite University Newspapers

Oocyte or egg donation has been part of the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) landscape since the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, ART clinics, agencies, and family law offices began to place advertisements in college newspapers seeking egg donors to build egg banks and for particular couples. Couples themselves also began to seek out specific donors that matched criteria they were looking for. These ads grew from blanket calls for egg donors between particular ages to asking for intelligence defined by SAT scores, specific races, eye and hair colors, and more. Although scholars such as sociologist Rene Almeling and political scientist Erin Heidt-Forsythe have written about the eugenic assumptions at play in egg donations, this has mostly emerged from looking at clinics and agencies who broker eggs. Focusing instead on both clinical and individual advertising in elite university newspapers more easily reveals eugenic afterlives in how potential egg donation recipients talk about the genetic inheritability of intelligence and race. Considering that ads are placed in elite university newspapers, these egg recipients are targeting presumably intelligent students whose genetic material would contain supposedly superior DNA to pass on to potential offspring. Race is also assumed to be a stable biogenetic concept. These ads reveal how egg donation recipients are implicated within larger societal inequalities and power dynamics surrounding race, kinship, ability, and privilege.