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Hawley Fogg-Davis
Excerpted from Hawley Fogg-Davis, 'Navigating Race in
the Market for Human Gametes,' 5(31) Hastings Center Report 13-21, 13-16
(2001) (footnotes omitted).
Navigating race in the market for human gametes: when people go
shopping for gametes, their first and most important criterion is the
donor's race. In so choosing, they are making wrong and invidious
assumptions about what race is. They are also assuming that their child
will develop her sense of self within those parameters. The effect is
harmful both for children and for society at large. People should be
able to recognize racial categories as they construct their own
identities, but those categories should not limit their
self-identification from the very outset. Since the first successful
birth resulting from in vitro fertilization in 1978, ethicists have
debated a wide spectrum of moral questions raised by IVF, including
concerns about economic exploitation, profiteering, health effects on
women's bodies, interference with traditional family norms, and
children's welfare.
Yet these discussions rarely, if ever, address the racially selective
use of reproductive technologies. Legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has
documented a racial disparity in access to and use of reproductive
technologies, pointing out that even though black women experience
infertility at higher rates than white women, white women are twice as
likely as black women to use reproductive technologies. But no one has
yet explored the production and
reproduction of racial meanings within this newfangled market.
How do descriptive and prescriptive notions of race affect the
economic behavior of those who possess the financial means, time, and
cultural capital to pursue assisted reproduction? Conversely, how do the
racial choices of gamete consumers shape contemporary notions of race?
Are whites, who comprise the overwhelming majority of gamete consumers,
morally justified in choosing the gametes of a white donor? Is same-race
preference among black or other nonwhite gamete shoppers morally
different from same-race preference among whites? Do cross-racial
choices, such as a white couple's request for an Asian American egg
donor, amount to benign or invidious racial discrimination? In sum, what
role, if any, should race play in the selection and purchase of human
reproductive tissue? Race-based gamete selection raises two major,
linked ethical issues.
One is the harm that racial stereotyping causes to individuals, and
the second is the public awareness that racial stereotyping is an
accepted feature of this largely unregulated market. Choosing a donor
according to racial classification is based on racial stereotypes of
what that donor is like, and of what a child produced using that
person's gametes will be like, as well as the gamete consumer's own
racial self-concept and racial aspirations. Race-gamete selection is
tied to race-based desires in family formation.
The dangerous subtext, or subliminal message, conveyed by race-based
gamete choice is that a child created using the gametes donated by a
racially designated person ought to adopt a race-specific cultural
disposition, and develop his or her self-concept within those
parameters.
The net result is the constriction of individual freedom in forging
one's identity. Negative social repercussions also flow from this
process of racial sorting. Naomi Zack argues that the white American
family has historically been and continues to be 'a publicly sanctioned
private institution for breeding white people.' Race-specific gamete
shopping underscores and extends Zack's point.
Assisted reproduction, as the name suggests, brings reproductive
decision-making into public view. Racial choices made in this arena
publicly reinforce and make explicit the routine use of racial
discrimination in the choice of a partner for procreative sexual
intercourse. It is not so much that the former is morally worse than the
latter. Both operate on the level of racial stereotype, prejudging and
weeding out certain individuals based at least partly on their ascribed
race.
The unique problem of racial choice in the gamete market lies in how
interpersonal racial choices are expressed. Noncoital reproduction
requires people to articulate a race-based reproductive choice that
usually remains unspoken in coital
reproduction. The price tag attached to these racial reproductive
choices enhances the publicity of the stereotyping. Explicit racial
selectivity in the gamete market has the potential to uncover submerged
racial biases that permeate the U.S. social terrain. But if we unearth
these racial desires only to ignore them, thereby affirming them by
default, then we end up sanctioning stereotypes of race-based familial
structure. The fact that racially coded donor profiles exist and can be
viewed by the public makes this practice part of our public
consciousness. Hence, race-based donor choices are inextricably tied to
public notions of the normative role that race ought to play in family
formation.
My argument against this mode of racial stereotyping is not based in
color blindness or a call for abolishing racial categories. Race can and
should be a source of self-identification, and to some extent group
identification, but it should never be overwhelming or fixed. What is
needed, instead, is a way for individuals to mediate or navigate over
the course of their lives between the racial categories ascribed to them
and their own racial self-identification.
I call this theoretical concept 'racial navigation.' Racial
navigation recognizes the practical need for individuals living in a
race-conscious society to acknowledge the social and political weight of
racial categories, while urging individuals to resist passively
absorbing these expectations into their self-concepts. My objective is
to maximize human freedom under the existential pressure of racial
categories. While racial navigation begins at the personal level, I
intend for it to guide interpersonal conduct in the market for human
gametes and beyond. Before delving into the theoretical underpinnings of
racial navigation, and demonstrating how it might mitigate the
perpetuation of racial stereotypes in the gamete market, I want first to
give a brief overview of how race is marketed in the business of paid
gamete donation. . . . |
