In the early 2000s, India’s fertility industry attracted thousands of foreign infertile parents seeking to build their families through commercial gestational surrogacy and egg donation. While many intended parents sought egg providers of different backgrounds from within India, others chose to utilize eggs with similar skin tone as themselves, often opting to pay women from countries such as South Africa to travel to India for the purposes of egg donation. This article examines the process of transnational egg donation from the perspective of the women who travel abroad in order to make their eggs available to global consumers pursuing parenthood through gestational surrogacy. How do these “traveling egg donors” make sense of their “donations” in India? Drawing on ethnographic research with doctors, egg providers, and intended parents, I show how the social positions of egg providers influence how they view their role in egg donation. In particular, South African women viewed their own eggs as gifts, rather than commodities to be exchanged, while Indian egg donors viewed their “donations” in explicitly commercial terms. When situated within a broader framework of transnational inequalities, these narratives of egg donation, I contend, reflect and reinforce the ways in which certain kinds of bodies are privileged in transnational reproduction, in order to illuminate the ways in which egg donors of different nationalities and skin color are differently valued, compensated, and treated.

Daisy Deomampo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Fordham University. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose research interests encompass science and technology studies, critical race studies, reproductive health and politics, and bioethics and social justice. Her book, Transnational Reproduction: Race, Kinship, and Commercial Surrogacy in India (NYU Press, 2016), based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India with Indian surrogate mothers, Western intended parents, and egg donors from around the world, illuminates the intersections of race, power, kinship, and inequality in the context of transnational gestational surrogacy. Her research and writing have been supported by multiple sources including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Dr. Deomampo’s current research explores the social meanings of race, identity, and DNA in the context of egg and sperm donation among Asian Americans in the United States.

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