Women who sell or donate their eggs and giving away a whole lot more
Donating motherhood
“Is this egg worth $50,000?” is the provocative title of an article in Self magazine (Nov. 2000) that takes a close look at the new world of “egg donation.” According to its author, Sheila Weller, close to 4,500 American women “donate” their eggs every year. Receiving $50,000 in exchange for a “donation” is obviously disingenuous. Federal law prohibits the selling of human organs, and although ova may not fall under this prohibition, egg brokers play it safe by paying “donors” only for their time and effort. Nonetheless, the “donor” who gives indication that she will provide an egg of a higher quality will receive a check for a larger sum. Intelligence is a premium. States one broker, “The greatest initial determinant of a donor’s fee may be the SAT score.”
A brouhaha erupted in January 1999 when a couple placed an ad in student newspapers at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other highly prestigious universities, offering $50,000 for an egg from a woman of a special kind: “Intelligent, athletic egg donor needed for loving family. You must be at least 5’10”. Have a 1400+ SAT score. $50,000.” The ad raised the unsavory specter of eugenics converging with capitalism, as well as a high-tech, but meretricious form of female exploitation.
The ad also raised doubts about its own authenticity. A California reproductive endocrinologist, however, has stepped forward and testified that the egg retrieval in question did take place (though he could not say whether there was a successful pregnancy).
Darlene Pinkerton, who has the curious occupation of being an “egg broker,” reports that her newly formed agency has paid $614,500 for 32 egg removals, an average of $19,203 per donation, with two donors earning $50,000 each. Anna (a pseudonym), who is a junior at a prestigious university, has “donated” her eggs on three separate occasions to three different couples. She has raised her fee now that she is involved with her fourth couple.
Not every egg, needless to say, will be fertilized. The failure rate involved in effecting conception in a dish, successfully implanting the young embryo in the uterus, and achieving a normal gestation is extremely high. In order to improve the chance of bringing about a successful delivery, egg donors are super-ovulated with fertility drugs. Much concern has been expressed in the medical profession about a possible connection between the use of powerful fertility drugs and ovarian cancer. The money is very real, however, whereas the risks are hypothetical.
Rachel (another pseudonym) is an illuminating case in point. She has received approximately $35,000 for 17 of her eggs that ripened at the same time as a result of fertility drug injections. Two eggs were fertilized, but in both cases implantation was unsuccessful. Fifteen eggs were frozen for possible future use. At this writing, Rachel does not know if the genes in any of her remaining 15 eggs will ever express themselves in a live person. Freezing and thawing eggs also has its hazards.
Rachel worries about whether “there would be a little me … or lots of mes … out there.” This is another way of saying, “Will I be a mother?” She knows instinctively that she becomes a mother at the moment a spermatazoön fertilizes one of her eggs. She is also implying, “Will I be alienated from my own motherhood and divorced from my children before I even have a chance to meet them?” If her thought processes break through the thin rhetoric woven by her professional spin-doctors, she will realize that she is selling her eggs and donating her motherhood.
Perhaps more accurately, she is being asked to donate her motherhood to another woman. She is asked, of course, to do something that a mother cannot really do. Motherhood is a substantive part of a woman’s identity. A woman can no more give away her motherhood (a non-transferable reality) than she can give away her daughterhood or her sisterhood. She is asked to deny who she is, a radical self-denial that puts her odds with herself.
There is a curious inconsistency in the fact that a magazine that goes by the name of Selfcan so cavalierly ignore both the importance and the very integrity of the self. “Donating” an egg is not the moral or personal equivalent to donating blood or even donating a kidney. The fertilized egg from which a new human being develops is profoundly related to its mother by invisible moral and personal bonds.
To deny this bond is to deny a very real dimension of the self. It is, in effect, to truncate the self, to violate one’s own personal identity. Ironically, the kind of woman whose eggs would be most desirable is precisely the one who would have too much self-respect to want to give them away. No amount of monetary compensation justifies this act of self-reduction. Personal identity is something we are. Money is something we have. The primacy of being over having is a cardinal principle of morality. A woman can expand herself through becoming a wife and a mother. She repudiates herself when she tries to become an egg donor.
Donald DeMarco is a professor of philosophy
at St. Jerome’s University in
Waterloo, Ont.
