Companies offer women $7,000 for donating eggs

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Companies offer women 7,000 for donating eggs

• By Rachel Rohr
• Washington Square News
• http//www.southend.wayne.edu/days/2003/January/12
  82003/news/eggs/eggs.html

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Supply of Eggs?

• (U-WIRE) NEW YORK - The ATM refuses to dispense
  cash and the receipt reads, "Insufficient funds."
  Suddenly the ads in the WSN become more tempting
  "If 7,000 will feel great in your pocket,
  imagine what you'll feel in your heart. Become an
  egg donor and fulfill an infertile couple's
  dream."
• Many egg donor programs and individual couples
  looking for donors advertise in student
  newspapers to target women between 21 and 32. The
  ads offer thousands or even tens of thousands of
  dollars for eggs, but it is not easy money. Egg
  donation is a more strenuous, lengthy and risky
  process than sperm donation. Instead of a copy of
  Playboy and a cup, egg donation entails extensive
  screening and tests three types of medication,
  one of which requires 10 days of self-injections
  in the buttocks frequent early morning checkups
  and a short surgical procedure.

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How Much?

• Though 7,000 may seem like a lot of money to
  some, to others the gift of another woman's eggs
  is priceless. A donor egg allows an infertile
  couple to conceive a child that will be
  biologically connected to the recipient mother
  through her pregnancy, and genetically connected
  to the recipient father through his sperm. Some
  of the recipients are single women or lesbians,
  and this technology enables them to conceive
  without necessarily being fertile.
• Most ads and classifieds that offer sums of
  15,000, 25,000 or up to 100,000 are not placed
  by clinics or hospital-based programs, but by
  individual couples recruiting their own donor, or
  by an agency they have hired.
• Donors to egg donation programs are usually
  anonymous, but applications ask for various
  details about physical appearance, education and
  religion. Rules, however, are different for those
  individual couples offering far more money. Not
  only do they want to meet their prospective
  donor, but typically the couple has a very
  specific image of what kind of woman they want,
  often specifying the precise physical appearance,
  talents and SAT score the couple is looking for
  in a donor.

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Updated listing
http//www.fertility-docs.com/egg_donors.phtml
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The Economics
Supply

• What do you think?
• Is it ethical?
• Would you pay it?
• Would you do it?

Egg Donors