Is a Woman just an Egg Factory?

Dear Alice,

I have seen multiple advertisements for egg donation in my school's newspaper. I could sell my eggs for $25,000 or more! That's a year of tuition! There's got to be a catch. When I do some research to find out the procedure and the risks, I only seem to find ovum donation "businesses" — not the most straightforward sources on the subject. Alice, I trust you! Can you tell me... what have I got to lose?

— Laying Golden Eggs

The above request for advice from Alice appeared on the website of the Columbia University health service, and refers to the "Egg Donors Wanted" ads increasingly seen on the Internet, in college newspapers and on city trains. According to USA Today and MSNBC, fertility clinics, stem cell researchers, and brokers are bidding up the prices paid for human eggs. One ethicist says that eggs have quickly become "commoditized."

Prices are especially high for fertile college women with top test scores and picture-perfect looks. Many websites exhibit pictures of potential donors sorted by hair color, height, dress size, education and SAT scores. Many donors openly acknowledge that money is a big factor in their decision. "Everyone does it for the money," says egg donor Jennifer Dziura, an aspiring model in New York with perfect SAT scores. "No one would do that for free - maybe for your sister, but not for a stranger." Twenty-five year old Kristin McKenna donated her eggs to help build her savings. "It does feel weird to know there's a child out there," says McKenna, who has signed up to donate again.

Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, sees the problem growing as states such as California move closer to funding major stem-cell research, requiring more donor eggs. "We worry that we offer people so much money that they are blind to the risk and their motivation is strictly the money," Kahn says. That's the very reason, he notes, that it is illegal to sell an organ, such as a kidney, for donation. "So I'm not comfortable saying we should start that with human eggs," he says.

The American Fertility Society feels it is wrong for human eggs to be "sold", but it considers it acceptable to compensate a woman for her time, inconvenience and risk associated with the process of donation. Specifically, an egg donor first takes medication to stop her menstrual cycle. For the next several weeks she injects hormones into her lower abdomen to hyperstimulate her ovaries to immediately produce a crop of mature eggs. Afterward, a needle is surgically inserted through her vaginal wall to suction the ripened eggs from her ovaries. Between 12 to 60 eggs are harvested at once and used for stem-cell research, or invitro fertilization for infertile or homosexual couples

My heart goes out to couples struggling with infertility and college students strapped for cash. People troubled by both problems are represented more than once on the team at CBMW. Nevertheless, like yesterday's post on "wombs for rent" in India, the bioethical concerns are overwhelming. Gender Blog will leave it to other commentators to sort out the myriad sinful problems represented above, and instead focus on the tragedy of commoditizing women.

Being paid for selling eggs, surrogate motherhood or prostitution in each case reduces a woman to the cash value of her femininity. Tellingly, egg broker websites display intimate life details, photographs, and personal essays but not the name of the woman herself. A woman created in the image of God should not be sold in parts.

When Eve was presented to Adam as a helper, he immediately recognized that she was "at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh." The marriage relationship of holding fast and forsaking all other is not a commercial transaction for only one component of a woman. A complementarian man should not purchase parts of different women. A complementarian woman created by God should not give away immodestly or sell cheaply any part of herself.