Oocyte retrieval is an ultrasound-guided obscenity. It is an invasive, needle-foisted f***, and I use that phrase advisedly. It’s done to a needy young woman whose ovaries are plu-mped up (on Gonadotropins for about 12 days) to a point of having a gaggle of sappy follicles.

Her legs are hauled up in stirrups and her parts prepped (with saline, inside-out) by a hard-bitten Mallu nurse. Then a truncheon-like ultrasound transducer probe coupled with a long metal tube is heaved into her vagina and manipulated till it rests against the vaginal vault and can see (ultrasonically), in the recto-uterine pouch, the brilliantly puddled burlesque in her ovaries.

For the harvest, a 30-centimetre needle is introduced through the metal tube to puncture the vault of the vagina and bayonet the ovary, repeatedly, to drain the sap from each of those follicles. In the sap, she gives up the most precious sequins she owns. Her oocytes.

For third-party reproduction, the donor sells her eggs to infertile couples. These eggs will be fertilised in vitro by the barren woman’s husband’s sperm. It fetches the donor anywhere between ₹30,000 to a lakh. By common consensus (ICMR guidelines), she’s allowed to peddle six ovarian cycles.

The ICMR guidelines mandate complete anonymity for gamete donors. The egg donor has to sign on a consent form (in her own language) that includes, among other things, the following: ‘I understand that there will be no direct or indirect contact between the recipient, and me, and my personal identity will not be disclosed to the recipient or to the child born through the use of my gamete.’

Registers maintained by Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) clinics and donor agencies are works of apolitical physical anthropology. They have everything on the subject that is phenotypically on the surface. That’s allowed. Along with baseline anthropometric data — age, height, weight, body mass index, skin colour, colour of eyes, colour of hair, facial physiognomy, marital status, past medical history, details of education, etc. And evidential ‘matrimonial’ photographs — pimped up whole-body portraits and close-ups, for that is their lure, the high cheekbones, the heritable cephalic and nasal index, the promise of fecundity in the eyes. Close-ups are also for genealogical clues. As per the ICMR guidelines, clients aren’t supposed to see this data or the photos, but they always do. The point of a registry of oocyte whoredom is that uxorious husbands and their wives can connubially give them the glad eye before making the selection. These women aren’t sexually available, but they’re sexually accountable.

In third-party reproduction, one isn’t allowed to administer identity to the eggs, so the only labelling activity that comes about is usually religious. Apart from that, these are lists innocent of social stratification, and strangely, there’s a category missing in them that might particularly confound many. Caste.

It was from a small but perkily formed young lady (a donor, now a gamete broker) that I received a sort of halfway Marxist explanation of caste as superstructure in third-party reproduction. Quite clearly, Assisted Reproduction isn’t the Asiatic mode of production. It is a free market. The prices are determined at the intersection of supply and demand. In this market though, individuals with subordinate social identities have become owners of capital. It is estimated that 60 per cent of donors are Muslim and about 80 per cent of the rest are Dalits. It’s a bit trite, but it must be said: the Muslim and the Dalit, for savarna Hindus, is the anthropological ‘other’.

As an empirical exercise, my wife and I conducted a series of interviews with gamete donors and brokers as a part of an amateur caste audit for two of Delhi’s most prolific ART clinics. This is in no way representative of the trends in Delhi or north India, but it does its share of question-begging. Women from the following castes are commonly found in the oocyte trade (at these two ART clinics; in no particular order): Dhanak, Jatav, Balai, Balmiki, Khatik, Giarah, Julaha, Dhobi, Mazhabi Sikh, Pasi. The caste location of the donors is never in the registries. The donor is therefore without a social identity. The idea that identity can be an indicator of merit or worth, and that, in turn, determines their labour market outcomes, obviously doesn’t exert itself here. At least not sizeably. A utilitarian view is applied. Fair skin, a certain height, physiognomic likeness, clean medical record, no infectious diseases, good ovarian reserve, previous motherhood, graduate degree, and rarely, Mongoloid or Caucasoid facial composite: these could be the basis for differential and discriminatory practices. Not caste. Obviously, there are times when clients insist on Brahmin and Jain oocytes, but what to do? Dubeys, Tiwaris, Oswals and Jaiswals (for retail) are scarcer than hens’ teeth. The capital in the reproductive market is with the subalterns.

Third-party reproduction, as it plays itself out, is a violation of the fundamental premise of caste — endogamy. The system of caste was held in unchanging equilibrium for about 2,000 years by an absolute prohibition on sexual congress across caste. The word jati is actually untranslatable into English. The closest descriptor would be ‘birth group’. The caste list above of egg donors includes the ‘ontologically unclean’ (manual scavengers, sweepers and hide skinners), the ‘ontologically menial’ and those listed under the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871 (from a tribe “addicted to the systematic commission of non-bailable offences”).

The ontology of these castes is found in chapter 10 of Manusmriti. It describes the horrors of miscegenation, of hypergamy and hypogamy (f***ing up and f***ing down), more elegantly called anulomyena (with the grain) and pratiloman (against the grain). The loss of endogamy produces mixed castes. These are not Shudras, one of their progenitors was. They are a rung below. The further loss of endogamy in these mixed castes produces the outcastes, and it goes on, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. A lot of wordage is expended in chapter 10 to produce a typology and nomenclature of categories formed due to the many permutations from such unions. Each of these is ordained an occupation. Bed-makers, idol-dressers, betel-leaf sellers, indigo-dyers, saddlers, horse-trainers, rope-twisters, butchers, hill coolies, they’re all there. The Antevasayi, for instance, has a Chandala male parent and a Nishada female parent. These are the carcass removers. The Chandala (scavenger) comes from a pratiloma union between a Shudra male parent and a Brahmin female parent.

The registries in the ART clinics provide the unwilling blind spot for commensal taboos to be suppressed. “The real remedy for breaking caste is intermarriage,” wrote Ambedkar in a lecture he was to deliver to the Jat-Pat Todak Mandal in Lahore (it was called off because it questioned the scriptures). “Nothing else will serve as the solvent of caste.” The loss of endogamy in a lab can’t be a bad thing either.

( Ambarish Satwikis a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer )

asatwik@gmail.com

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