So, I've been thinking a lot lately about potentially selling my eggs for money, but I still feel like I need to get all sides of the "what ifs" before I go ahead with it.
I don't have a moral problem with it - I personally see it as helping other people who might not be able to conceive. I'm young, fit, healthy, and I know this is a privilege ... and the privilege of having a healthy reproductive system is something that I don't have a use for right now in terms of bearing children, and don't know if I ever will. I also don't see my eggs as having an type of personhood or that any baby that would result from them is "mine."
I guess I'm more worried about health concerns, but also wanted to ask people if there are some feminist dialogues circulating around this that might offer a point of view that I haven't considered yet. I'd love to hear what people's take on this is.
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How come people are allowed to sell eggs and sell sperm, but if you try to sell your kidney that's illegal?
why are you allowed to get paid for donating blood plasma but not whole blood? it's what people have bothered to write laws about.
You get paid to donate plasma and not blood because of the pain involved in the donation. It isn't nearly as painful to donate blood as it is to donate plasma.
somewhere in one of my college texts i remember a passage about how the level of contaminated blood decreased once the usa switched to a donor system instead of paying for blood. the logic was a person selling blood is usually poor and lacking access to health care.
hold on and see if my google-fu can dig up a link or two.
My guess is that markets generally are outlawed when communities feel there is a high potential for abuse and exploitation.
And I guess it comes down to whether or not the potential for exploitation outweighs the benefits in having that market; and also whether or not there is a workable mechanism that doesn't provide as much of an incentive for exploitation as profit tends to do. Even though donor systems are less efficient, they tend to be less exploitative.
You can live without your kidney, but your quality of life isn't as good, and I believe it is a lot more risky than selling eggs. With selling sperm, there is no health risk, and I don't think there is any long term side effects to donating eggs. I think they make laws against selling kidneys because you don't want people who are poor hurting themselves to pay their bills. In short, your body doesn't miss it's sperm or eggs, but it would miss your kidney.
That makes a lot of sense!
If someone needs a kidney then they need it to live, and it would be unfair for people with the money to buy a kidney to get priority, while a poorer person would just have to die. While infertility is a problem for people of all classes, ultimately the ability to buy someone else's eggs or sperm is a luxury, just as in-vitro or fertility treatments are.
I have not experienced this, but in this anthology called "Choice," there is a story about a daughter donating her egg to her mother who is trying to have a baby with her much younger husband. There are a lot of other issues that arise from this in the woman's personal tale, but the thing that stuck with me from the story is that is a very painful procedure.
I considered it before as well. The major detterent for me is the invasiveness and painfulness that is involved.
I think it's pretty awesome - giving people the ability to have children. Though I also cringe somewhere inside at the thought of all the orphaned children out there in the world... but, to each his or her own, I suppose.
I could be wrong, but I swear I read somewhere (as I was curious about it myself) that it could result in pretty big health risks. I vaguely remember one of them being higher chances of cancer in the reproductive organs.
I would say that you should do thorough research about it. Try different companies, see what they say, and look for testimonies from women who have had it done in the past few years. Good luck!
I've heard that the drugs they put you on, to make you ovulate, can increase your cahnces of cancer aswell. ):
Keep reading up on it all, your your GP for information, or your gyn. Try and get as much information so you feel comfortable if you decide you will donate.
Definitely read up on health risks a lot. It can be risky.
There is a lot of wrong information out there on egg donation. I have gone through several cycles, and it has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. The risks are wildly overblown by word of mouth; studies repeatedly show no increased risk of cancer or harm to future fertility. It has never been very painful for me either. Personally, I get really tired of correcting everyone's misconceptions just to justify my decisions, so rather than hash it all out in the comments here I'd be happy to discuss it with you by email or chat, if you'd like to know one person's experience.
As an aside, it's considered rude and improper to call it selling. You are compensated for going through the retrieval procedure, even if they don't get any eggs out of it.
I was interested in this too. The problem I had was that you have to take birth control to sync your ovulation with that of the buyer. I wouldnt want irrepairable damage to my libido. Is it the case that you always have to take birth control pills prior to donating the eggs?
Do you really take birth control? Because that would make you NOT ovulate, and doesn't really do anything to your cycle-- the "periods" you have while on the pill are fake and easily skipped or shifted around. It seems more likely they'd have you take pills that make you ovulate at a specific time.
Anyway, birth control in general may or may not affect your libido. Don't be too scared of it on those grounds!
Basically how it works is you go on the pill to stop you ovulating, then they get you to stop taking it so that they'll know when you are going to ovulate. I'm not an expert on this aspect of reproductive technology though (I just eat lunch in the same room as people who are)
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/610201/my_egg_donation_experience.html?cat=5
http://infertility.lifetips.com/cat/64206/egg-donation/index.html
http://www.fertilitystories.com/fertilityblog/2006/01/egg-donation.html
"Do you really take birth control?"
This is what I've read from sources. The first two links detail that the donar had to take birth control.
One other thing- there definitely are feminist implications and considerations regarding egg donation/surrogacy/anything like that. I'd be happy to talk all about that too! There is a great post on Feministe about it.
A friend of mine is actually looking to do this and I was wondering if there were any places you would suggest going to for informaiton.
Thanks :)
1. Six billion people in the world says we don't need anymore babies but that's just imho
2. if you do kudos. but be careful because some asshole somewhere could demand YOU make payments because of your genetic material being used
3. i wouldnt do it personally, but i'm overly paranoid and suspicious of the government. and an avid supporter of the voluntary human extinction movement.
Will you know the names of any kids that result from your eggs? There's something to be said for knowing who your offspring are-- what if you later have other kids and they grow up and meet and want to date each other? I know that isn't very statistically likely, but I wouldn't want to always worry that some guy in the right age bracket could potentially be my daughter's older half-brother.
Yes, there's definitely something to be said for knowing who your kids/parents are. Even just so they know a proper medical history, like if heart attacks or something run in the family. Good to know!
On this- donors give a full medical history for themselves and their family, so that information is always available to the parents. It's required in all cases. Also, in many cases, the donor will agree to provide the doctor/agency/family with any changes in her medical history into the future if she acquires any kind of hereditary medical condition.
Sometimes you know the kids' names, sometimes not. It depends on the terms of each individual agreement. If that's something really important to the donor, she can always just refuse to do a cycle unless the family is willing to share that information. Many families prefer anonymity though.
It's my understanding that it's usually a months-long and incredibly unpleasant and invasive process, and that you won't get more than $10,000 (and probably about $5,000). The standard advice is to do it if your primary motivation is to help an infertile couple and you wouldn't mind a bit of extra money, but to stay away if you want to "sell your ova" to earn money. The way clinics and couples often look for "donors" matching ideal trait profiles (some of them not hereditary but education- and class-based) smacks me as eugenics. It might not be popular to say so, but with all the kids languishing in foster care (mostly post-neonatal, multi-ethnic, or with [often quite manageable] "special needs"), couples/women who can't have a child that's genetically related to them have better options than to get into eugenics and risk someone else's health for it (and there are risks, especially related to the lack of any real clinic oversight). I realize that that's not how it all goes in every case, but there are often huge problems with the "donation" system, etc., as it currently exists, and anyone who's contemplating getting involved in it needs to be aware of them.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/12/08/wombs-for-rent/
Here's the link to the post I mentioned before. If you read that whole post, as well as everything linked within it, you should have a good grasp on the feminist issues with egg donation and surrogacy. It addresses exploitation, why adopting is not necessarily an easy or right answer, among a million other things.
And just to briefly address a few more things:
Yes, you take birth control pills for a few weeks before you start the medication that produces the eggs. This is just as a means to control the timing of the cycle.
And no, no one will ever be able to force you to pay child support or anything like that. Egg donation agreements are legally binding contracts, and they all will state that you have no responsibility to any children born from the donation. It's important for you, the donor, to be aware of these things so you can make sure your interests are represented. This extends to things like whether you want to know if any children are actually born, if you want them to be able to contact you in the future, if you want the parents to know who you are or whether you want it to be anonymous. You have to be your own advocate. In some cases you will not have the option to negotiate these things- you either accept the terms as they are or you don't do the cycle. In other cases you can set your terms and let the parents decide whether they agree to them or not. Those things will depend on whether you use a matching agency, your own attorney, or go straight to a doctor's donor program.
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit now. Obviously there is a lot to consider. I don't know of any one place to look for all the relevant information for someone interested, because I've been gathering information from all over the place and from my own experiences over the past 3-4 years.