Ethics on the Ground: Egg Donor Agency Behavior in an Unregulated Legal Environment and the Growth of Ethical Norms in a New Field

This dissertation explores the ways in which egg donor agencies make decisions in the absence of law, and what normative regulations and meanings, moral and otherwise, those decisions create. I analyze what resources and beliefs agency decision-makers employ in the day-to-day running of their organizations, and whether decision-makers consider the myriad ethical implications of their business./nBased on semi-structured interviews with agency decision-makers, primarily in California, as well as other infertility field professionals, I find that, rather than modeling their organizations on other egg donor agencies or analogous institutions as might be predicted by new institutionalism, egg donor agency decision-makers fall back on their personal moral beliefs when making on-the-ground decisions in the course of running their agencies. I examine agency decision-makers' responses to uncertainty in their (new) field and to pressures from outside their field to explore how decision-makers incorporate their moral beliefs into their organizations./nThe following chapters demonstrate how this particular group of agency decision-makers think about the complex questions that arise in the course of bringing together infertile people and egg donors for the purpose of creating a baby. I find that agency decision-makers are often ambivalent about the ethically questionable aspects of egg donation, such as the commodification of human eggs and the potential exploitation of egg donors, and they overcome their ambivalence using a variety of strategies aimed at minimizing any damage to egg donors and intended parents while simultaneously enabling the ultimate goal of helping people to build their families./nThis dissertation also shows how agency decision-makers navigate in an unregulated legal environment. They criticize those members of the field they deem to be unethical in order to show themselves in a positive light by contrast, and they affiliate themselves and their agencies with established professionals, such as physicians and infertility clinics, in order to share in those professionals' legitimacy. Finally, in the absence of regulation, a small number of agency decision-makers have conceived a nonprofit organization, in some respects similar to a professional body, intended to create a set of ethical standards specific to egg donor and surrogacy agencies./nUltimately, this dissertation demonstrates that although agency decision-makers reference their own moral beliefs when making day-to-day decisions for their agencies, those individual beliefs are translated to the organizational level, as predicted by an inhabited institutions theoretical approach. And as predicted by an institutional logics perspective, each individual agency decision-maker does not exist in a vacuum, but instead is subject to multiple institutional logics (such as societal ethics, family, medical professional, mental health professional, and egg donor agency). Counterintuitively, however, all of this diversity--diversity of personal beliefs and diversity of institutional logics--results in a convergence of egg donor agency practices into an emerging set of ethical norms and a shared moral meaning: the value of taking good care of agency clients and donors, and the joy of helping people have babies.

Advisor: Luker, Kristin