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one of the egg agencies considers the donor’s fee a nontaxable “gift” from the recipient.
    The most extreme case I heard of postcycle giving was reported by OvaCorp’s donor manager.
    Donor Manager: I paid a donor $25,000. That’s only because it was $10,000 for the donor’s fee, and then when their kids were born, they gave her an additional gift of $15,000.
    Rene: Are you serious?
    Donor Manager: Oh yeah. That was a gift to her. They said, “What do we do?” Well, you bought me and [the donor] a pair of $3,000 earrings. They’re a very wealthy couple. I love them. She had [the earrings] made by somebody in Italy. Mine had rubies at the end of them, the donor’s had emeralds, and the couple’s, hers had sapphires. So when her girls were born, she says “Maybe I’ll get her some more earrings.” I said “The likelihood of her wearing those earrings is very slim [because] she’s really low key.” I said “Give her a financial compensation.” She’s like, “Okay, I’ll give her $15,000, 7,500 [dollars] per girl.” She had twins.
    Here, the monetary value of the recipient’s gift to the donor is explicitly tied to the number of children she had as a result of the donor’s eggs, making the line between gift and sale indistinguishable.
    In egg donation, the earlier stage of fee negotiation gives way to an understanding that donors are providing a gift to which recipients are expected to respond with a thank-you note, and many choose to give the donor a gift of their own. In sperm donation, men are far more likely to be treated like employees, clocking in at the sperm bank at least once a week to produce a “high-quality” sample. Indeed, this framing of donation as a job leads some men to be so removed from what they are donating that when a new employee at Western Sperm Bank excitedly told a donor that a recipient had become pregnant with his samples, she said it was like “somebody hit him with this huge ball in the middle of his head. He just went blank, and he was shocked.” During his next visit, the sperm donor explained, “I hadn’t really thought about the fact there were gonna be pregnancies.” The donor manager described this state of mind as “not uncommon.”
    Anthropologist Rayna Rapp observes that “Contemporary biomedical rationality . . . [is] operating to reproduce older forms of gender, ethnoracial, class, and national stratification even (or perhaps especially) on itstechnologically ‘revolutionary’ edges.” 19 Indeed, these portrayals of altruistic femininity and emotionally distant masculinity fit a very traditional pattern, and the sperm donor’s reaction exposes the reflexive application of gendered norms in this medical market. Although most egg donors will never meet their genetic children, they are still expected to be “naturally” caring, guiltily hiding any interest they might have in the promise of thousands of dollars. This is a form of emotional work not required of men donating sperm, even though they are more likely to be contacted by their biological offspring through the banks’ identity-release programs.
    ONE PROGRAM, TWO KINDS OF DONATION
    Donor insemination and in vitro fertilization developed at different times in distinct spheres of scientific research. Many early commercial programs were started by people with links to these worlds, so they generally offered egg donation or sperm donation but not both. This division of the market into sex-specific firms continues to the present, with most programs specializing in one or the other. To assess whether the gendered protocols that exist at CryoCorp, Western Sperm Bank, Creative Beginnings, and OvaCorp persist even in organizations that sell both eggs and sperm, I turn briefly to daily business practices at Gametes Inc. and University Fertility Services.
    Gametes Inc. was one of the first commercial sperm banks to open in the United States, but it was nearly thirty years before it decided to get