Posted on 03/16/2006 2:48:58 PM PST by Indy Pendance
Can't link but the gist of the article is, if you are a pretty, smart (SAT's over 1300), young, female college student, and need cash, sell your eggs on the internet for at least $10,000, and in some instances, $65,000.
When hormones (especially manufactured hormones) are added to the body for whatever reason...birth control...menopause...egg donation...the evidence is irrefutable that most women will end up with side effects in one way or another. There are some great books out there by Dr. John Lee and Dr. Christine Northrup on the subject.
Good luck finding any actual published research to back that. The language you cite is lifted from boilerplate warnings included on donor waiver/consent forms. Such warnings -- for egg donation or anything else -- invariably include all sorts of far-fetched things that somebody somewhere has imagined "might" happen in some cases. More to the point, since a significant percentage of women experience infertility at some in their lives anyway (and especially the elite college graduates who are disproportionately represented in the donor pool, and tend to put off childbearing until their late 30s or beyond), and in most cases it is impossible to identify a specific root cause, language like this in waiver forms protects clinics from endless litigation where women and unscrupulous attorneys (like the John Edwards type) try to persuade a scientifically clueless jury to award millions of dollars in damages to the woman, on an unsubstantiated claim that her infertility is due to a previous egg donation cycle.
There doesn't have to a basis in fact for these attorneys and plaintiffs to put good doctors out of business. Edwards is among many who have proved that point, by convincing juries to blame obstetricians for cerebral palsy and similar conditions in babies they delivered, claiming improper procedures were used during delivery. In fact, the medical literature, which used to suggest that there MIGHT be a connection in some cases, is now universally finding that virtually all cases of cerebral palsy arise in utero, long before the mother goes into labor. But never mind the facts; those obstetricians now can't practice any more, since Edwards and his phony plaintiffs rendered them uninsurable; and in many areas of the country women are a couple of hours or more from the nearest obstetrician, increasing the number whose babies end up with major avoidable complications, or even death, due to the unavailability of timely obstetrical care.
The fact is that egg donation has been going on for quite a long time now, with many former egg donors having already gone on to start their own families (though a surprising number of egg donors have already completed their own families before donating), and there has been no evidence whatsoever of increased fertility problems. There is anecdotal evidence that the stimulation process used for retrieving eggs actual INcreases fertility, at least in the short term. A significant number of women and doctors are reporting case where a women with years of infertility does an IVF cycle, is unsuccessful with it, but then goes on to get pregnant naturally soon afterwards. This is probably not a long-term effect, and so wouldn't apply to most donors, since they're usually not planning to have a child of their own shortly after donating, but it is additional evidence of the lack of harm from egg donation.
A big upside of egg donation is that the donor undergoes extensive testing in advance, at the clinic's expense, so that if she is headed for premature ovarian failure, she'll find out in time to have a child of her own. Quite a lot of women discover in their late 20s or early 30s (and occasionally even earlier), when they start trying to have children, that their ovarian function is that of a woman on the verge of menopause, and in most cases they are either unable to have a child which is genetically their own, or must undergo multiple IVF cycles in order to have one. There are no warning signs until it's too late; most of them are having prefectly regular menstrual periods. But donors who are college-aged or just a bit older, will get an early heads up if they have this problem, and avoid the often heart-wrenching and/or financially devastating outcome.
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