The recycled fetus: Ethics of waste and gift exchange in new reproductive technologies

The goal of this thesis is to expose and analyze the ethical problems of the proposed use of fetal ovarian tissue as a source of donor eggs for infertility treatment, from an embodied, feminist ethical perspective. Fetal ovarian tissue is taken from an aborted fetus and used to help another woman become pregnant. An ethical analysis of this use must begin by considering the construction of pregnancy in the powerful discourses of medicine and law. Medical discourse constructs pregnant women as fetal containers. Legal regulation of pregnant women normalizes and enforces this status. Medical discourse further constructs female reproduction as wasteful. Fetal tissue, and other reproductive tissues, are medically understood as waste. This classification makes their use, which this thesis argues is akin to recycling, appear ethically acceptable.; The drive to recycle fetal ovarian tissue reflects a pervasive inability to accept loss in medical technoscience and modern Western culture. Recycling fetal ovarian tissue elevates the biological building blocks of life, or “life itself” over individual lived lives. In a society which already devalues people based on social characteristics such as gender, race and class, the elevation of “life itself” will further devalue these lived lives. Recycling has further implications: it destroys the work of memory and forgetting; it provides redemption for abortion thus confirming the success of the American anti-abortion movement in establishing it as a “bad” act; and it helps medical technoscience, as a cultural system in itself, to manage the problem of death. Currently, human tissue donation is ethically acceptable only when it is given and received as a gift. This thesis argues that giving and the gift relationship do not transform the waste and recycling aspects of fetal ovarian tissue use into an ethical process; rather, they disguise this utilitarian approach to fetal ovarian tissue and women seeking abortions.; Women's ethical work in remembering, forgetting and narrating abortion stories is lost in the drive to recycle fetal ovarian tissue. The recycled fetus is an unethical gift.