Egg Donation Imaginaries: Embodiment, Ethics and Future Family Formation

Abstract

This article considers the sociological utility of the ‘imaginary’ for understanding how a growing number of women who seek to conceive using donated eggs might make sense of their future desires, hopes and ambivalences. By combining the imaginary with insights from authors working on ideas about everyday or ‘ordinary’ ethics it considers how deliberations about egg donation take place and how future motherhood is constructed. Three main aspects of what are referred to as ‘egg donation imaginaries’ are defined: ‘imagining donor egg motherhood’; ‘imagining donor motivations’; and ‘imagining the donor’. The article illustrates how the imaginary is a valuable analytical device because it illuminates how ideas, ambivalences, deliberations and reflections about future family building are deeply social, embodied and reflexive. The imaginary advances sociological theorising of reproduction more generally and helps to bridge existing tensions between individual practices and wider social and policy imaginaries.