Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 6A: Donations Welcome
Chair: Mary Didelot

Selling the Social as Object: Online Donor Banking and the Standardization of Semen
Susan Rogers
Department of Sociology/Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Canada

This paper explores the history of human sperm banking from the late 1970’s to today’s online market. Of special interest are the ways in which semen is now categorized online, due largely to meaningful negotiations among actors within social worlds. Reflected upon, is the optimal health of the donor as predominantly translated through their social rather than medical histories, as these are crucial characteristics in determining the marketability of the materials themselves. Objective markers for healthy sperm have come to be constructed as such largely due to shifting negotiations between doctors, donors, and patients. Examples of the classification, standardization, and objectification of these materials will emphasize the multi-layered negotiations involved in the construction of meanings while describing the semantic evolution of semen through a cultural history of sperm.
As the market for human reproductive tissue flourishes, reproductive materials gain value beyond their basic life-giving properties. The major attributes reflecting the value of sperm include race and ethnicity, beauty, sexuality, intelligence, and athletic competence. How does the sperm of someone beautiful, young, smart, athletic and heterosexual, come to elicit a certain price on the market- or more specifically, how is a biological material personified and marketed as technosemen? A hierarchy of reproductive materials is most often created through classification, where a higher price is paid for the most finely negotiated balance between differences and standards. Social and cultural constructions are ultimately deemed important nexuses for the online exchange of sperm, which in turn paradoxically sells the social through the re-creation of semen as a standard, categorized unit, rendering it an object in the aperspectival imagination.

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How People Perceive Differently Organ Donation. The Case of Switzerland
Peter Schulz
School of Communication Sciences, Health Care Communication Laboratory, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland

Improvements in transplant medicine have transformed transplantation from an experimental stage to the therapy of choice for patients with organ failure. Consequently, there is a growing gap between the numbers of patients needing a transplant and those receiving one. Partly this development is due to the lack of awareness of the population toward organ transplantation. Statistics about the regional donor rate in Switzerland over the last years show that there are considerable differences between the German and French speaking area on one side, and the Italian speaking canton Ticino on the other side. The Canton Ticino ranks fairly high with regard to the number of donation (in the last three years year, an average of 37-42 donations per million inhabitants), meanwhile the organ donation rate in the other linguistic areas of Switzerland, in particular in the German speaking part is rather low.
There are at least two possible explanations for these differences concerning people’s willingness towards organ donation between the main linguistic areas in Switzerland. The first one is to arguing that people’s awareness and attitudes towards organ donation depends mainly on the given information on the mass-media. We conducted a content analysis in order to see whether media coverage in the canton Ticino is more comprehensive, informative and less controversial than in other linguistic areas of Switzerland. The paper will therefore present in the first part how, when and in which form (positive or negative statements) the media reported on organ donation between 1999-2003. Another (and stronger) explanation refers to the existing cultural differences between the German speaking part and the Romanic part. We understand cultural differences in a broad sense, including issues as for example different attitudes towards life, religious factors, emotions, as well as different forms of dealing with such an issue as organ donation within the own family. As to this explanation, we refer to the findings of a public opinion survey we concluded in 2004. Based on these data we conclude that the cultural background has an often underestimated impact on people’s attitudes towards organ donation.