‘It is like spinning around yourself’: Privatisation of reproductive care and routinisation of egg donation in Iran

Egg donation is the most sought-after method among all forms of third-party assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) in Iran (Abedini et al., 2016). Despite its relative popularity, egg donation is exercised at an intersection of ambivalently gendered socio-cultural structures and the absence of specific laws. Accordingly, the decision taken by involuntary childless couples to make a family through egg donation is subject to a collection of bio-social impositions. These include but are not limited to the interpretation of legitimate biological reproduction as asserted by Islamic discourses around kinship and patriarchal norms of childbearing in Iran. In this paper, I examine how experiences and perceptions of ART users with donor eggs have evolved and been rearranged – since the early 2010s – through the privatization of reproductive health care, implementation of family law, and gendered connotations of gametes. On this account, I draw on data gathered from my ethnographically informed fieldwork in two fertility clinics, a private clinic and a public hospital, in Tehran (2019), and 35 in-depth interviews with prospective mothers, egg donors, and medical staff, along with the collection of available legal documents. Applying the sociological concept of ‘routinisation’ (Thompson, 2005; Wahlberg, 2016, 2018) of reproductive technologies as an overarching framework, I argue that despite enforcement of pronatalist policies since 2012 (Hoodfar, 2017), the privatization of advanced reproductive technologies in Iran has intensified ‘stratified reproduction’ (Colen, 1984) whereby the access and possibility of becoming parents through medical technologies are steered towards the affluent Shia citizens while many are left in a precarious position. Here, third-party egg donation technology renders a proxy for the magnification of intersectional inequalities in terms of gender, sexuality, religion, class, and personal status.