Oral Presentations Abstracts: EGG DONATION IN ART. LEGAL AND LOGICAL ARGUMENTS

Abstract

View of Volume 66, Special Issue, September 2021

The procuring of eggs and compensatory measures for donors today present unresolved ethical and conceptual issues, which fuel the growth of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry.

The speech proposes a problematization of the phenomenon from a legal point of view, supported by a rhetorical-argumentative analysis of the legal institutions.

The legal provision of oocytes admits the only donation. It was deduced by analogy from the legislative provisions of available of organs and tissues (law no. 458 of 1967; law no. 301 of 1993; law no. 91 of 1999; law no. 483 of 1999), which provides for the balance between impairment of the psycho-physical sphere and goods that benefit from it. Is this balance comparable to the available of oocytes? Or does it need an autonomous redefinition? The various national regulations show that in Europe the term donation includes not only solutions of substantial gratuity, but also various forms of compensation.

On one side this shows the fragility of the definition of donation, rhetorically constructed through the Aristotelian argument of the dissociation between reimbursement and remuneration, and on the other it makes clear the need to use logical-argumentative tools to disclose the criterion of hierarchization of values in game.

It remains to be understood how ethical reflection, led by an argumentative legal analysis, can provide the tools to improve the functioning of a system that seems to render donors’ rights unfit for use.