Documentary and media analysis

The research I have so far outlined is deeply intertwined with legal provisions, since ova flows and their legitimacy are dependent on the regulations pertaining to the movement of tissues. Before starting

fieldwork, I collected and reviewed laws and public policy papers related to the assisted reproductive industry and organ donation in Romania and the European Union. Official documents are material-discursive

productions based on a series of assumptions which may not be openly stated, therefore not only what is being said, but also the context in which it is said matters (Wood and Kroger, 2000). While I did not place these documents at the centre of my research, they informed my analysis of the dynamics of regulating assisted reproduction and ova provision.

The process of collecting the relevant legal documents was in itself an indication of the convoluted attempts at regulating the field in Romania. The inexistence of a unified law meant that I had to identify all

documents, of higher or lower legal status, that regulated the field. At the same time, the numerous law proposal that had been drafted were not easily accessible, and it took time until I identified all six of them. My first source of information was the Romanian Parliament website, where all debated laws, together with their institutional trajectory, are theoretically stored. However, how and why certain law proposals changed in time was not always clear. Interviews were critical in ordering these

documents in a chronological order, as well as accounting for the multiple variants of the same law. Regarding the other documents I needed to find, I bought a temporary subscription to a Romanian legal database. By searching according to certain key words, such as

“assisted reproduction”, “in vitro fertilisation”, “gamete donation”, I was able to retrieve a considerable number of documents, but selecting what was of relevance turned out to be a challenge. After scanning through those that seemed central to the practice of assisted reproduction, I returned and read in more detail the regulations that participants signalled as hallmarks in their activity.

Documentary analysis and the other methods I used for research evolved in parallel: depending on what I would find in the field, I would search for a particular law, or revisit what I had already read. Similarly, certain legal details prompted me to ask particular questions during interviews. The content of these documents was not easily accessible for me, since I do not have a legal background, and being conscious about the unknown meanings even banal words could carry, I constantly tried to clarify what consequences those provisions bore on everyday assisted reproduction. However, from a researcher’s point of view, it was

interesting to find that even those who were directly affected by these regulations – especially medical professionals – did not always

understand what these documents implied. This observation turned into an area of investigation in itself, highlighting possible legal shortcomings that had an important impact over the field.

For me as a researcher, many of these legal documents played the primary role of placing events in context, clarifying why certain

participants positioned themselves the way they did, and how the history of Romanian IVF was legally shaped. The law proposals that aimed at

regulating assisted reproduction, of which none was adopted, were scrutinised in more detail. I was interested in identifying common themes, such as the occurrence of ova provision specifications, as well as the framing of these themes, e.g. whether compensation for ova provision was permitted. I tried to connect these written regulations with the processes through which they came into being (Jasanoff, 2005), paying attention to who had been involved in their drafting, the

motivations they invoked in supporting their frame, as well as the efforts they invested to attract support.

Another legal document that I have been granted access to by the authorities was the police report regarding one of the ova

commercialisation cases. Because it referred to a case that had reached a resolution, the report entered the public realm and could be obtained following an official request, which I sent through an email message.

After several weeks of waiting, I received the file through the same means. Stretching over more than 200 pages, it conveyed detailed information about the persons and practices involved in the case, offering much more detail than I had been able to collect from media stories. More importantly, though, was the fact that the file allowed me to also analyse the workings of the juridical apparatus in framing the case.

The manner in which events were classified as ‘illegal’ and presented in a cumulative order so that they could constitute the ground for the

prosecution of several parties, the way in which declarations were edited for clarity and dissected in order to become evidence, the comments of the author of the file, who is not merely an objective, detached narrator, they all offered rich research material that contributed to my analysis of the construction of ova providers’ identities from a criminal perspective (see Chapter 4).

Finally, as the lack of access to ova providers forced me to turn to other sources in order to analyse the way in which they were portrayed in various sites, the importance of media stories increased in my

research. I approached them not as reflections of events, but as another apparatus through which meaning was ascribed to ova provision,

especially in its commercial form. Out of the 54 articles collected in

relation to ova provision in Romania, I analysed in more detail 25 of them.

The selection process was based on the exclusion of the articles that focused on clinics which were accused of selling ova, but which were not confirmed by the police. To avoid speculation, I only included articles about the two commercialisation cases that were confirmed by police investigations and several other media productions (articles and videos) concerned with commercialised ova provision in general. Some of the events I discuss in my thesis happened many years ago (in 2005), which reduced the number of stories I could find: some had been taken down by publications, others had links that no longer worked.

Consequently, my aim was to analyse all the stories related to the Global ART and Sabyc cases that I could find, eliminating those that were simply reproducing content from other original sources. The 25 articles that I eventually settled upon were different enough in order not to be redundant. Given that I did not have an overwhelming number of stories, I did not use other criteria for selecting them.

My focus during media analysis was on the construction of the identities of those involved in ova scandals: clinic owners, medical professionals, administrative personnel, and ova providers, emphasising the class and race undertones used in connection to the latter. This analysis also helped me identify whether the ova commercialisation cases were politicised or placed in the larger social context. Just as in the case of the police file, not only the content, but the manner of presentation – tone of voice, language, choice of details - was also considered in my analysis due to its contribution to framing the issue.