Accounting for Life
Image: US tax exemption form 8283 for charitable donation of property
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After learning about their daughter's inherited genetic condition, a couple decides to pursue in vitro fertilization (IVF) with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) for their next child. The procedures produce one diseased embryo, which the couple donates to a biobank for stem cell research with hopes of establishing a treatment--or better yet, a cure--for their sick daughter. They also file an unprecedented income tax deduction for the value of the embryo, defined as property, at the time of the donation. Reducing their tax liabilities would help them fund the care of their sick daughter. What is being valued or accounted for in this family's story? What do these accounting practices tell us about the value of care versus cure in the US?
---- In an uncanny coincidence of misfortune, a fertility clinic in San Francisco and Cleveland announce in March 2018 the unexpected: their cryopreservation tanks failed. Thousands of patients with eggs and embryos stored in the dysfunctional tanks learn that their frozen assets and fertility hopes are compromised. Within a week, patients file the first of dozens of lawsuits seeking recompense by claiming damages for the incalculable, from unrecoverable fertility among cancer patients to physical and emotional costs associated with fertility treatments. One couple sued claiming damages to their embryos as persons. How will the courts determine the value of what has been lost? What are the stakes of these determinations for other reproductive health matters? |
Stories like these inspire my ethnographic and historical interest in accounting practices within reproductive health care. In addition to fertility preservation and reprogenetic technologies, I am planning to collect stories from families with sick babies in and after neonatal intensive care.
Writing
Capitalist forms of valuation are a growing area of interest in scholarship on reproductive technologies, with scholars paying increasing attention to financialization within the global fertility sector as well as critiquing the extraction of value from reproductive bodies and their parts. My research on embryo donation suggests that mundane and routine calculative practices also figure centrally in reproductive and regenerative technology sectors.
I am preparing an article titled "Accounting for Life" that focuses on one family's story of donating their diseased embryo to a biobank for stem cell research in hopes of establishing a cure for their sick daughter. I examine the family's unprecedented personal income tax deduction for the estimated value of their frozen embryo ‘asset,’ which they filed to generate funds for their daughter’s care. I argue that this tax form functions as a banal, though no less speculative, financial instrument through which caring and curing become accounted for as reproductive labor.
I have enjoyed workshopping this article with incredible scholars at the "Cold Storage: Time, Temperature, and Transit in Feminist Science & Technology Studies" symposium hosted at Hampshire College in May 2018 as well as at the "Remaking Reproduction: The Global Politics of Reproductive Technologies" conference hosted by the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge.
I am gathering data on legal and media coverage of the two cryotank failures in March 2018.
I am preparing an article titled "Accounting for Life" that focuses on one family's story of donating their diseased embryo to a biobank for stem cell research in hopes of establishing a cure for their sick daughter. I examine the family's unprecedented personal income tax deduction for the estimated value of their frozen embryo ‘asset,’ which they filed to generate funds for their daughter’s care. I argue that this tax form functions as a banal, though no less speculative, financial instrument through which caring and curing become accounted for as reproductive labor.
I have enjoyed workshopping this article with incredible scholars at the "Cold Storage: Time, Temperature, and Transit in Feminist Science & Technology Studies" symposium hosted at Hampshire College in May 2018 as well as at the "Remaking Reproduction: The Global Politics of Reproductive Technologies" conference hosted by the Reproductive Sociology Research Group at the University of Cambridge.
I am gathering data on legal and media coverage of the two cryotank failures in March 2018.