How do those involved in Spain’s egg donation industry—donors, clinicians, and clinic staff—experience its pressures, medical interventions, and moral codes? Which complex power dynamics underlie this fertility market? And what can the Spanish case tell us about reproductive and fertility markets more widely?

In her important new book, Taming Egg Donors: The Egg Donation Reproductive Market in Spain, Dr Anna Molas offers a fresh perspective on Europe’s largest egg donation industry.

Drawing on rich ethnographic work and adopting a feminist lens, Molas shifts attention away from donors’ intentions towards the lived experiences of donors and practitioners alike. The result is a subtle but powerful account of the gendered, racialised, and classed power dynamics that cut across this industry and that, combined, serve to ‘tame’ women’s bodies in service of logics of extraction.

Anna Molas, Lecturer in Anthropology at Monash University, is a social anthropologist and ethnographer whose work focuses on reproduction, health, and society. She was an ISRF First Book Fellow 2023.

Anna will be joined by Chandra Kala Clemente-Martínez, President of the Associació de Persones Adoptades a Catalunya, author of Volver a los orígenes (Bellaterra Edicions, 2022); and Laura Perler, postdoctoral researcher in the Social and Cultural Geography research group at the University of Bern, author of Selektioniertes Leben (Edition Assemblage, 2022).

A Q&A will follow, moderated by Chris Newfield, ISRF Director of Research.