Limitations of my research

The writing of this thesis was motivated by a need to understand the multiple enactments of ova provision and the identity dynamics of those involved with it. From a political point of view, this thesis was also meant to account for the marks left on the bodies of ova providers following their engagement with assisted reproduction. This latter

objective has only been partially achieved. The difficulty of telling a story

in the absence of its main characters means that there is more than physical harm that needs accounting for. The material and discursive invisibility of ova providers points to the need to understand the process of their displacement by those who take decisions in their name, or at least decisions that will gravely affect them. I have presented here both the contingent and the historically enduring factors that have contributed to the construction of providers’ identities, and the framing of ova

provision. However, my restricted access to providers constitutes one of the main limitations of this research. I have tried to compensate for this by critically approaching the discourses about ova providers emerging from third sources, whether documents or other participants’ narratives. I have countered the stereotyped portrayal of providers by analysing the bias inherent in these narratives, while constantly monitoring my own practices in thinking and writing about them. Nevertheless, much of ova providers’ experiences and opinions have remained hidden and untold.

This remains an important stake in future research concentrated on Romanian ova provision in particular, as well as in other contexts in which providers’ voices are largely absent.

Except for Nahman’s (2013) book, the lack of previous research that investigates Romanian ova provision means that my own work is to a certain extent exploratory. The need to understand the complex

entanglements affecting ova provision, as well as my reduced access to providers contributed, although were not decisive to, my multi-sited, broad approach to the topic. Consequently, my account may at times lack more detailed insights into the relationships and practices of ova provision, especially concerning events placed further back in time. This leads me to my next point.

The stretch in time of the phenomenon under consideration – ova provision – has made analysis somewhat difficult due to a lack of

resources. The beginnings of IVF and ova provision in Romania, the first legal provisions that established the official regime, as well as the first attempts at regulating IVF are to a certain extent shrouded in uncertainty due to the partial lack of paper trails. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, the Internet was only slowly gaining ground in Romania, few institutional or media outlets were accessible to the public on the world wide web. The

people that contributed to the medical and legal development of ova provision have been hard to identify and locate during my fieldwork, social and institutional networks had changed. Additionally, people’s memories were also prone to faults due to the passage of time.

Consequently, my own narratives stretching back to those times are sometimes sketchier in an attempt to avoid speculation and stick to events that I could verify.

3.11 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have mapped the choices and challenges I was faced with as part of my endeavour for understanding ova provision. The use of feminist and STS methodologies was motivated by the necessity of foregrounding women’s – especially ova providers’ - bodies and experiences in a discussion about a phenomenon that affects them directly, ova provision. Ethnography allowed me to focus on the practices through which ova provision is enacted, as well as on the fluidity and performativity of identities. I did not embark on a search for ‘truth’, but focused on the apparatuses used by participants in order to frame ova provision, while at the same time acknowledging the fact that my own research was an intervention, and not a detached endeavour.

My commitment to a feminist epistemology and methodology reside in my positioning towards the world I researched, the people I talked to, and the manner in which I conducted my fieldwork. Following the feminist tradition, I reject the possibility of a detached observer having unmediated and unrestricted access to the world. Instead, I use the awareness of being responsible for the work I have undertaken to minimise the potential harm I inflict, while accepting the fact that the analyses and conclusions I provide are attempts at understanding phenomena which are forever changing and constantly subjected to our particular comprehension frameworks. While the downside of this is that direct and complete understanding will never be available to us, the upside resides in the possibility of constant becoming left to the people materially and discursively intra-acting. Thus, also part of my feminist undertaking is my choice to focus on women’s bodies and experiences,

legitimating a type of embodied, gendered, classed and raced

knowledge which has often been neglected or relegated to the margins of academic scholarship and political action. The intersectional approach I have towards women’s identities is also indebted to feminist tradition, dedicated to the task of enabling women to escape constraining social categories and achieve a more fulfilling existence. Analysing the power dynamics women are part of has allowed me to account for their

absence from public discourse and political decision-making, and bring them back as a central concern in terms of their role in reproduction. In order to be able to do this, I juxtaposed different accounts from multiple sites, allowing a multi-faceted picture to emerge and enable a potentially nomadic experience in its empowering sense.

A multi-sited research often requires multiple methods that can tend to the specificities of each site. Using interviews, observation, and documentary analysis I was able to gather diverse data about a complex phenomenon. The multifaceted character of ova provision emerged as a consequence of having access to multiple, sometimes contradictory, perspectives. Moreover, using more than one method allowed me to analyse the apparatuses used in framing ova provision in more depth, as well as draw attention to the material traces, such as documents, left as part of the unravelling of phenomena.

Data analysis and writing were co-constitutive of each other and were in their turn performative, for they played their own role enacting ova provision. Because of this, I had a responsibility in the way in which I diffracted this phenomenon and those involved with it, especially ova providers. Tending to the partiality of knowledge, the fluidity of identities, and the impossibility of effectively disentangling agencies, I avoided the reification of that which I was studying, leaving space for political change and contestation.

Reaching objectivity was for me, following Barad (2007), a matter of accounting for the marks left on bodies both by the participants in my research, and my own research and writing activities, and it is these academic, ethical and political commitments that make my work feminist.

Although perspectives are always partial, they are not necessarily equally ‘innocent’ (Stacey, 1994) for they have material consequences

that do not affect everyone in the same manner. Therefore, I

concentrated both on understanding ova provision as a set of material-discursive practices, as well as catering to the exclusions performed through these practices. In terms of my own positioning as a researcher, I identified it as my duty to primarily talk about those bodies – women’s bodies - which are most often left at the margins of people’s

preoccupations and, consequently, society. In so doing, I tried to limit the harm done through my intervention by taking safety precautions towards participants and paying considerable attention to the risk of reifying identities through my writing.

Chapter 4 – Ova ‘trafficking’: a criminal view on ova provision

4.1 Introduction

In 2005 and 2009, two Israeli fertility clinics based in Bucharest, Romania, were prosecuted by the national authorities following

suspicions that the two had been commercialising ova across borders.

Both cases attracted intensive media attention, as well as national and international institutional reactions that have affected how ova provision has been done in Romania for years to come. In 2015, when I conducted my research, these events were still important hallmarks in the history of Romanian IVF for many of those involved with various aspects of

assisted reproduction, from infertility patients and clinicians, to politicians and administrative personnel. The power these ova commercialisation cases have had in framing both legislation on ova provision, and the public discussions surrounding this medical procedure and exchange practice constitute the reasons for placing them at the beginning of my data analysis endeavour.

In the absence of first-hand accounts, the ova commercialisation cases are analysed here through the lens of the media and the police.

The media stories and the Sabyc police report that constitute the source and basis of my research are treated as apparatuses that produce understanding and shape the world they ‘observe’ (Barad, 2007). Both the media and the police highlight certain aspects of the events they analyse, while leaving others unattended. They do this by using specific technologies, standards, and practices. In this thesis, I do not have the aim, the data and the space to analyse all these elements in detail, but instead aim to create the picture of a complex material and discursive dynamic that has led to certain readings of ova provision. This chapter, then, is particularly preoccupied with the framing of ova

commercialisation as ‘trafficking’, a criminal act ‘threatening’ Romanian society, as well as with the absence of ova providers as authors of the narratives emerging from these events.

This chapter goes on to illustrate how certain practices of

commercial ova provision in Romania were criminalised and constructed as a threat both to women’s bodies and to the body politic. Giving due attention to the apparatuses used for this construction, the categories of

‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ emerge as unstable, but with important material-discursive consequences. The harm following ova commercialisation was largely distributed amongst ova providers, and yet it was these, together with the foreign clinics, that were found accountable for the damage. The social disparities existing in Romanian society were eluded from mainstream narratives surrounding what the media termed ova

‘scandals’.

The chapter commences with an analysis of the Romanian media stories that emerged following the start of the investigations at Global ART and Sabyc clinics, since these were the primary sources that informed the general public about what was happening in those cases.

However, I do not engage in a mere narration of facts, nor argue that these stories had a decisive role in people’s interpretation of the commercialisation cases, since I had no means to quantify this media influence. Nevertheless, I approach the media as a reflection of largely-held social values. Therefore, I analyse how events were framed by journalists, who transformed them into ‘scandals’ of ‘trafficking’ before any sentence was given by a court. I pay special attention to the construction of the identities of those involved as either criminals or victims, focusing on the case of ova providers and how their class and race inscriptions were enacted discursively for entertainment purposes.

The media emerges as an important apparatus that helped locate the events at Global ART and Sabyc in the criminal realm, dissociated from the socio-economic context that contributed to their materialisation.

The second section of the chapter moves on to another apparatus for the construction of ova commercialisation: the police report following the investigations at one of the above clinics, Sabyc. With the help of the report and the data from an interview with the prosecutor who authored the text, I explore the process through which the conclusion that Sabyc had indeed been ‘trafficking’ ova was reached by matching the evidence with the legal definition of the term ‘trafficking’. As in the case of the

media, I explore the ways in which events were framed and opposing identities were constructed so that guilt could be, in the prosecutor’s view, accurately attributed.

Finally, the third section of the chapter is dedicated to the identity construction of ova providers both in the police report and by Sabyc’s staff. As in the case of the media, I comment on the lack of control over the narratives they are part of, as well as the actions they were recruited into. The richness of the data from the police report allows me to go into detail into their enactment as victims-workers-criminals, a fragmented and unstable identity premised on class and race considerations.