Egg donation imaginaries: embodiment, ethics, and future family formation

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper considers the sociological utility of the ‘imaginary’ for understanding how a growing number of women who seek to conceive using donated eggs might make sense of their future desires, hopes and ambivalences. By combining the imaginary with insights from authors working on ideas about everyday or ‘ordinary’ ethics it considers how deliberations about egg donation take place and how future motherhood is constructed. Three main aspects of what are referred to as ‘egg donation imaginaries’ are defined: ‘imagining donor egg motherhood’; ‘imagining donor motivations’; and ‘imagining the donor’. The paper illustrates how the imaginary is a valuable analytical device because it illuminates how ideas, ambivalences, deliberations, and reflections about future family building are deeply social, embodied and reflexive. The imaginary advances sociological theorizing of reproduction more generally and helps to bridge existing tensions between individual practices and wider social and policy imaginaries