The Impact News

Issue date: 5/5/07 Section: News

Advertisements enticing females to donate eggs for large sums of money usually omit certain deails, such as health risks.

There are few twenty-something women walking the halls of any college campus who couldn't use a few thousand dollars in their bank accounts. And that's what's making a new advertising campaign so controversial.
A new market is expanding in American society: the biological frontier of egg donation. And prospective parents are willing to pay unprecedented amounts of money in exchange for the donation of life. Through fertility clinic mediators, couples are paying women between the ages of 21 and 35 anywhere from $2,500 to an astonishing $500,000 for a donor cycle of oocytes. And many clinics and enthusiastic couples are looking to college campuses for their potential baby's mother.
But critics complain that advertising a large sum of money to young female college students, without mentioning the risks they may incur, is capitalizing on a twenty-something woman's financial vulnerability.
Julia Derek, a former student at George Mason University, has donated eggs 12 times, and was first drawn to donation in 1996. "For someone who has no money, $3,000 is a lot. To me, it seemed like a lot of money; I didn't have that much at the time," Derek said, according to MSNBC.com. Derek has gone on to publish "Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor," a critically acclaimed novel about her donation experiences.
And there are probably a few women out there who are thinking, "Sounds great! For $500,000 I'd donate in a second!" But despite your motivations, be they altruistically or financially influenced, for not every woman's eggs are wanted. The couple who offered half a million dollars, for example, expected a woman who was 5'10", naturally blonde, and Ivy-league educated with a 1400 on her SATs or higher.
Sound discriminatory? That's because it is. But couples argue that they're looking for a child with the same traits as the parents, so as it grows up it will "match" its parents and the family will be as cohesive as possible. It's their money, they argue, so they can spend it as they see fit.
Welcome to the 2007 version of "you're just not pretty enough". Maybe in decades past, if your list of attributes was below a critic's standards, you would have difficulty dating. But today, women aren't alone in their rejection-their potential offspring joins them. It's not just you who's undesirable- it's your DNA.

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