ABSTRACT
Introduction Faced with long waiting lists for egg donation in Denmark, Lea and her husband googled egg donation and also talked to Danish fertility clinics about their options. They chose to visit IVI Valencia, a fertility clinic in Spain. Lea quickly became pregnant using a Spanish donor egg, which was fertilized by her husband’s sperm. In her story, Lea emphasizes the joy associated with now having a family, as well as her plans for a future pregnancy using one of the leftover frozen embryos, although she does wonder about her son’s biological connection to her. Yet, the fact that she carried him for nine months, shared her blood system with him, felt his kicks, gave birth, and nursed him, creates, she says, a biological connection between the two (Dahlgaard 2010). Lea’s story is by no means exceptional. The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE 2010) estimates that the multi-million dollar fertility industry now tailors its treatments to infertile individuals who are willing to travel in order to receive treatments that may be either unavailable or inaccessible at home. Legal barriers, along with the increasing privatization of infertility treatments, and long waiting lists, combined with new communication technologies that speed up communication among the various actors involved, are central to the emergent and growing trend of fertility travel. Key destination hubs, in terms of numbers of patients, include Spain, the Czech Republic, and South Africa for egg donation, Denmark for sperm donation, and India, Mexico, and the United States for commercial surrogacy (see, for example, Namberger, Adrian, Vora and Iyengar, this volume). This chapter focuses on Danish women who choose Spain as a destination for egg donation and embryo implantation. Three scholarly questions are considered: What are the Danish and Spanish legal and ethical contexts? How do Danish recipients of donor eggs who travel to Spain for treatment construct fertility travel? How are motherhood and relatedness negotiated and redefined in the making of Danish babies using Spanish eggs?
