Posted on 04/30/2006 3:11:01 PM PDT by wagglebee
Summer 2006 issue - Three years out of graduate school, Julia Derek has twelve kids. Or so she thinks. As a penniless senior at George Mason University, she spotted an ad in The Washington Post from a couple looking to buy a young woman’s eggs. Ten years, 12 donations, $50,000, and one successfully financed postgraduate degree later, Derek, now the author of “Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor,” explains the appeal of egg donation: “You’re doing a good thing, it feels good that people want you, it’s cool to spread your genes…It seems like a great thing to make money on.”
And college students can make a lot of money. An examination of campus dailies suggests just how much the DNA of an educated young woman who fits the requirements of the recipients might be worth. An ad in the Columbia Spectator promises $12,000 to a Caucasian student with brown hair and an SAT score above 1300, while two in the Harvard Crimson offer $35,000 to “one truly exceptional woman who is attractive, athletic, under the age of 29” and $50,000 to “an extraordinary egg donor. Must be between the ages of 18 and 26.”
“It’s really easy to get hooked,” says Derek, who initially became interested in egg donation when she realized it could substitute for a part-time job. “For a student it’s a ridiculous amount of money.”
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
What moral absolutes?
Wonder if an equally qualified African-American woman would have grounds for a discrimination lawsuit if her eggs were turned down.
>Money has a way of destroying moral integrity.
Actually, it's "The LOVE of money is the root of all evil."
I have to go out now, but there were a couple articles in the last week or so on FR about it, and the also mentioned earlier cases.
The exact same "argument", such as it is, could be made against adoption...
I'm only against people who mistake their own personal moral decisions for "more absolutes". To far too many people, the working definition of "moral absolute" is "whatever I decide is proper".
If you get a chance, please. I'll search in the meantime, but you know how tough it is to actually find anything with FR search (no offense to Jim & John R)
How about slavery, huh?
Highly unlikely, just as people who have given up children for adoption haven't yet been found liable for child support payments.
Children meeting and marrying can also be an issue in other circumstances. Like a man in a small town who sleeps around on his wife in secrecy, impregnating some other women.
Also adopted children, from a woman who gives up multiple children through her life for adoption. I'm curious if we have some sort of built in defense against that. Imagine in a small nomadic tribe how big of an issue that could be, one of the men knocking up more then one woman 20 years before.
This cuts to the most basic/primitive of all belief systems -- genetic/bloodlines. Is it any wonder people are a little put off by it?
Are you joking? These are EGGS!! They have not even been fertilized!
What a babe.. I must go against the trend here and say that I support people who are doing this. Think of the poor woman who wants children but can't have them? And her husband who can have children, and want to raise one of his own?
Honey West.
Yes and eventually they will realize that they have a biological child that they will never be able to see and the reason is because at some point in their lives they thought that several thousand dollars would be the answer to all of their problems.
Dollars to donuts, in a few years, one of the donors will sue for, and win child support from some guy that she never met.
As opposed to the moral relativism of the secular humanists. It's not "whatever I decide is proper," it is an adherence to thousands of years of Judeo-Christian principles which, to the dismay of many, is in direct conflict with the "what's right for me doesn't have to be right for you" rationale.
The last time I questioned "moral absolutes" all I got was nutjob ranting about "raping babies" as if that was all he could think about all day long. I think that, perhaps, religion does serve a purpose for such people.
They should have absolutely no guilt whatsoever. They have done a wonderful thing. They should be blessed forever for it. Any young healthy FReeper from a healthy family should consider giving such a gift. Today, for some reason, there are so many women with fertility problems, even early in the marriage years (early 30s). Maybe it's the environment, hormones in food, who knows. And there are couples with women with Premature Ovarian Failure who just dream of carrying and raising children.
These young women are not "paid for their eggs." And it isn't semantic. It is customary for reproductive donors to be compensated for their trouble. Men are not compensated as much because their compensation is basically a few minutes at the clinic to do what they normally do in the shower.
For a young egg donor, she must take several different meds in order to place her cycle into the control of the doctors, and then take hormones to increase the number of eggs that will ripen that cycle, and then have her in many times for careful ultrasound tests to make sure she is fine. Then she must undergo a slightly painful retrieval of the eggs, under usually just a local anethestic, and then take a few days to recover, maybe a month or so to really go back to her normal cycle. All in all, one cycle from start to finish affects her at least slightly for almost 3 months.
I think the normal $5K fee plus travel expenses and medical care (and procedure-specific insurance) is fair. These eggs are not children. They are no different from donated sperm, in a moral sense. Men have been donating sperm for years.
Well, in a free society folks pretty much have the right to believe whatever they want. They can prayer to space aliens or believe that Rob Schnieder is a towering comedic genius.
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