ABSTRACT
Introduction The Islamic Republic of Iran is the first Islamic country in which gamete donation can be practiced legally. It has been legal since 2003. Iran benefits from relative religious freedom concerning ARTs, as well as the medical possibilities of high-tech ART clinics and experts. In fact, more than 50 active specialized medical centers offer infertility treatments across the country, although only to heterosexual married couples; none of the centers accepts single women or nonheterosexual or non-married couples. Not only are many infertile Iranian couples using donor technologies, but Iran is also a major destination for “fertility travelers” (Inhorn 2011) from other Islamic countries. According to Marcia Inhorn (ibid.), ARTs are growing quickly in Iran, which gives it, together with Egypt, a leading position among Muslim countries in the Middle East. In this chapter, I examine the “naturalization” and “normalization” (Thompson 2005) of egg donation in Iran in conversation with Islamic doctrine and socio-cultural understandings of family structures and relatedness: a process which I refer to as the Islamization of egg donation in Iran. Inspired by feminist technoscience studies and feminist materialisms (see Thompson 2005; Smelik and Lykke 2008), I aim to show that the Islamization of egg donation in Iran is a multilayered process that highlights the entanglement of technologies, bodily materiality, religion, and socio-cultural values on reproduction and biological kinship. It is a process in which Islamic doctrine and the socio-cultural realities of biological relatedness, egg donation technologies, and bodily materiality coconstruct one another. Islamization is a process that is not only occurring on the macro scale of Islamic discourses but, as I will show, it also takes place as infertile Iranian women interact with egg donation technologies, and renegotiate meaning (such as cultural and religious values around biological motherhood) and materiality (for instance ova and milk). I draw on the material I collected during two periods of fieldwork in 2010 in Tehran, the capital of Iran. Each period lasted for three weeks in a private infertility clinic, during which I interviewed a total of 18 women who were considering egg donation as a possible treatment. I conducted the interviews in my mother tongue, Farsi, which is the official language of Iran. I have lived most of
my life in Iran and I am familiar with the religious and cultural context; yet, I recognize that it is an extremely diverse country in terms of religion, ethnicity, culture, language, and class, to name just a few. Such diversity both limits the scope of my study and affects my position as a researcher as I was both an insider and outsider to my informants during my fieldwork. For instance, my informants and I could (partially1) relate to each other in terms of gender, culture, and religion. Yet, we would drift apart as I was not a married woman nor was I a strict believer in Islam, which was brought up on occasion by my informants. I also collected data from the websites of several infertility clinics, and the Ministry of Health and Medical Education’s website.
