Newcastle University.
Northumbria University.
Br J Sociol. 2018 Sep;69(3):825-844. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12297. Epub 2017 Sep 7.
There are growing debates about the appropriateness of offering money in exchange for the provision of bodily materials for clinical treatment and research. The bioethics literature and many practice guidelines have generally been opposed to such entanglement, depicting the use of money as contaminating, creating undue inducement, exploitation and commodification of the human body. However, two elements have been missing from these debates: (i) the perspectives of those people providing bodily materials when money is offered; and (ii) systematic empirical engagement with the notion of 'money' itself. This article seeks to fill those gaps in knowledge by providing detailed insights from a project investigating the views and experiences of women who volunteered to provide eggs for research in exchange for reduced fees for fertility treatment. Analysis of 29 semi-structured interviews reveals multiple ways in which volunteers reason through the involvement of 'money' in this domain and shows how their accounts diverge from pessimistic understandings of the role of monies in everyday life. When volunteers speak in detail about the monetary aspects of their participation they draw major, recurring, distinctions in five overlapping areas: their depiction of the monetized world of fertility treatment; their views of the different forms that money can take; a distancing of their actions from their understandings of how markets and commodities work; their location of the transactions within a particular clinic, and the ongoing importance of their eggs, post-transaction. This article: (i) responds to calls for concrete case studies to assist understandings of the inter-relationships of money and specific aspects of social life; (ii) adds to the sociology of money literature by providing empirical insights into how notions of money are deployed; (iii) presents much-needed perspectives from providers of bodily materials; and (iv) contributes to ongoing conversations between bioethics and sociology.
关于提供金钱以换取用于临床治疗和研究的身体材料的做法是否恰当，人们的争议日益增多。生物伦理文献和许多实践准则普遍反对这种纠缠，认为使用金钱会污染、造成不必要的诱导、剥削和将人体商品化。然而，这些争论中缺少两个要素：（i）提供身体材料的人在提供金钱时的观点；以及（ii）对“金钱”概念本身进行系统的实证研究。本文试图通过提供一个调查研究提供卵子用于研究以换取降低生育治疗费用的女性的观点和经验的项目的详细见解来填补这些知识空白。对 29 次半结构化访谈的分析揭示了志愿者在这一领域中考虑“金钱”参与的多种方式，并展示了他们的说法如何与日常生活中对金钱作用的悲观理解不同。当志愿者详细描述他们参与的货币方面时，他们在五个重叠领域中得出了主要的、反复出现的区别：他们对生育治疗货币化世界的描述；他们对金钱可以采取的不同形式的看法；将他们的行为与他们对市场和商品运作的理解区分开来；将交易定位在特定诊所内，以及交易后的卵子的持续重要性。本文：（i）回应了呼吁具体案例研究以帮助理解金钱与社会生活特定方面的相互关系的呼吁；（ii）通过提供关于金钱概念如何运用的实证见解，为货币社会学文献做出了贡献；（iii）提出了身体材料提供者急需的观点；以及（iv）为生物伦理学和社会学之间的持续对话做出了贡献。
