Working Session I: Wombs and Eggs Across Borders
“International Ova Trade and Surrogacy Arrangements: An
Urgent Need for Legal Regulation at the International Level”
by Marsha J. Tyson Darling, Ph.D.
Professor, History & Interdisciplinary Studies &
Director, Center for African, Black & Caribbean Studies
Adelphi University
The Tarrytown Meetings on Genetics and Society
Tarrytown Estate Conference Center, NY
July 25, 2011
Some Questions for Consumers and Civil
Society Advocates
• What are the risks/benefits in the uses of reproductive and ova
production technologies? Who benefits, who does not? Whose bodies
are at risk? How accustomed are we to accepting the use of risky
protocols on low income and poor women’s bodies: i.e., the history
of developing contraceptive technologies? Where are calls for
greater “precaution”? What is “choice” in the context of situations
based on economic exploitation?
• What is the balance to strive for between collective, social justice
and personal liberties/individual choices?
• What mechanisms do we use to allocate resources and ensure health
and safety? The government -- the market ? What is the historical
track record?
darling@adelphi.edu
So, Why Regulation of the Fertility Industrial
Complex , What is the Problem?
• Regulatory divides are allowing a global
international market of privileged persons and third
party intermediaries to commodify reproduction by
exploiting low income women’s poverty/subordinate
status in both the global North and South; i.e.,
increase in gender based exploitation and physical
harms.
• Human reproductive and gestational surrogacy
are being “fitted” into a commercial manufacturing
model , the result: the baby business.
darling@adelphi.edu
ARTs and Gestational Surrogacy:
Infertility, Genetic Disorders
• NRTs have expanded exponentially benefitting many in response to
infertility, concerns for genetic markers for inheritable disorders.
darling@adelphi.edu
ARTs and Gestational Surrogacy: Wombs
for Rent in the North and South
The privilege and convenience of “skipping” baby making - but surrogates
are human participants not “biological resources” in complex system.
darling@adelphi.edu
The Ova Trade: Demand for Women’s Eggs
for NRTs and Stem Cell Research
• Unregulated in terms of health and safety, lack of data,
transparent oversight, and ability to protect egg providers,
gestational surrogates, and infants .
What are the Sharpest of the Harms?
• Unequal relationship between buyers and women who sell ova and those
who sell the use of their fertility organs and their entire body’s functions;
interests of buyers and intermediaries are dominant.
• Unequal transactions without transparent regulation of fertility-industrial
complex means: inadequate informed consent, coercion, low payments or if
trafficked no payments, fraud, poor health care, short and long term
physical and emotional problems and risk of death.
• Egg providers are exposed to deceptive advertising, questionable access to
sufficient information to make informed consent really meaningful, and a
lengthy and intrusive medical process with short and possibly long term
side effects.
• Gestational surrogates are exposed to many of the risks related to synthetic
hormonal stimulation; risk multiple births and infections.
darling@adelphi.edu
What About
Children Born
to Surrogates?
• Newborns w health
problems or disabilities
may be left w the
surrogate, abandoned or
placed in an orphanage,
or there may be
problems w establishing
citizenship for the
infant in the buyer’s
country.
darling@adelphi.edu
Goals of Cross Border Effective Regulation
of Fertility Industrial Complex:
• Protecting human subjects means protecting women from risky
biomedical applications; human subject protections can promote
safe medical practice and safe medical research; reproductive
organs, tissues and cell trafficking and/or trade, ova sale and
surrogacy infringe on basic human rights under international law
and violate international agreements on health and medical
standards. Trafficking/trade in reproductive organs, tissues and
cells is a unique form of human exploitation, in which ova
providers and contract or agreement surrogates are seen and often
treated as just “biological resources, ” not human participants.
darling@adelphi.edu
Elements of Cross Border Effective Regulation
of Fertility Industrial Complex:
Establish more accountable system for regulating fertility business.
Clarify legal framework, engage signatory participation.
Licensing of labs and researchers; collection of empirical data.
Transparency of monitoring procedures.
Prohibitions on commercial use of women’s reproductive capacity
within and across borders: egg donation and surrogacy must not be
commercial transactions; prevent black market trade.
• Prohibitions on ART facilities producing cloned embryos.
• Prohibition on commercializing payment for eggs and embryos.
• Prohibition on privatization of reproductive cells and gene
sequences.
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darling@adelphi.edu
International Agreements
World Health
Organization
Conventions and Protocols: Existing and
Amendable to Enable Advocacy
– The European Parliament Resolution on the Planned Trading of Egg Cells
by Great Britain and Romania (2005), and the European Parliament
Resolution of the Trade in Human Egg Cells (2005).
– The Declaration of Istanbul on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism
(2008) – it needs to add reproductive organs and tissues, embryonic or fetal
organs and tissues, genes and genetic sequences.
– The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (1997) and its
Additional Protocol on Transplantation of Organ and Tissues of Human
Origin (2002) – it needs to add reproductive organs and tissues, embryonic
or fetal organs and tissues, genes and genetic sequences.
– The Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in
Persons, Especially Women and Children – it needs to add reproductive
organs and tissues, embryonic or fetal organs and tissues, genes and genetic
sequences.
– The World Health Organization could possibly expand on its Human
Organ Transplantation concerns to include reproductive organs, cells and
tissues, genes and genetic sequences.
darling@adelphi.edu
Efforts in Some Countries
The United Kingdom
International NGO Conference
Policy and Advocacy Groups
A Closing Thought…
• While technologies enhance
human power they have
previously used and
exploited resources outside
of the human body; genetic
technologies involve science
and technology going within
us. If history holds any
lesson, it is that the
manufacturing model of
“raw materials” and “spare
parts” does not belong inside
of our bodies.
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu
darling@adelphi.edu