Free cheese can be found only in a mousetrap. And an advertisement from the University of Oregon student newspaper with a cheerful slogan “What’s a few eggs between friends?” offers cheese, $4000, for something almost any woman has in abundance, eggs. However, the advertisement does not say anything about hormone shots, blood work, doctors’ appointments and other many procedures or consequences of those procedures. Instead the advertisement says that the procedure would take place in “the pleasant Eugene clinic over a period of just six weeks.” However, positive rhetoric of the advertisement covers up an egg donation industry that sells a dream to infertile parents by taking advantage of young women and possibly damaging their health.
Egg donation industry buys, sells and makes money on making children. How is so? Simple, egg donation industry sells the dream to infertile parents by taking advantage of young women with financial trouble. Even though, programs that look for donors sell egg donation as an act of good will of helping infertile parents and, as Katie O’Reilly says in her article “Superdonor” and Rene Almeling says in her paper “Gender and the Value of Bodily Goods,” want candidates that want to donate eggs for some high moral reasons and not just for money. However, describing her experience, O’Reilly says that she donated eggs because she needed money. And, if you think about donation process where a woman needs to take hormone shots every day to stimulate egg production and other medications that can be potentially harmful or that retrieval of eggs is invasive process, most women without financial problem would not go through the process. I do not take into account special cases like donating an egg to an actual friend. We are discussing the process of taking possibly dangerous medications that can cause a woman infertility for the sake of some strangers who pays her for doing that. So, the whole process is not about doing something magical like helping infertile parents. Donation of eggs is about wealthy people buying young women eggs with risks of health problems for those women.
As a result, egg donation under a slogan of helping poor souls, infertile parents, to get their dreams, to get a child, abuse college student women who try to earn a degree for financially secure future. And to be more specific, the target is college student women whose parents cannot fully cover their needs. Also graduate female students are target since, for example, a salary of physics graduate student is between 20,000 and 30,000 dollars per year and an additional 4,000 or 5,000 dollars in six weeks sounds like a very good deal. Moreover, development of egg donation and egg freezing allows big companies to delay or control female reproductive age. According to the article “Why corporate promotion of egg freezing isn’t a “benefit” to all women” by Rachel Walden, companies like Apple and Facebook pay $20,000 to their female employees for freezing their eggs and postponing bearing a child. Therefore, as Walden points out Apple and Facebook and similar big companies use egg freezing technologies to avoid making accommodations for women who decide to have children and, therefore, oppress women. So egg donation development sells children, takes advantage of women who have difficulties with money (especially targeting college students), and gives a way to oppress women in male dominated professions by making women to choose between having a family or a career.
Anastasia,
These are excellent comments on the readings and all of these issues. There’s a lot here — the gendered language; the question of anonymity; the classism inherent in the way that the business is set up; the incredible amounts that some women’s eggs can command on the market; and language of gift giving and how that plays into all of this. It’s all very complicated, and I hope that today in class we can go through some of these issues more systematically. The industry is not regulated at all. Should it be to some extent?