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 ...
Years down the road people will have to take DNA tests before they procreate to be sure they're not brother and sister.
Most donor egg/sperm children grow up knowing their origins, just as adopted children do. Even today in 2006, DNA test kits with private mail order results are available for $100. Imagine what will be available in 20 years.
See post #42.
Thanks for the info, I didn't know that.
The most sickening thing I ever hear judicially are the cases where a couple adopts a baby, and then 4 years later, the biological "sperm donor" (shmuck who screwed the angel who gave up her baby rather than kill it) finds out he fathered a child, and some contemptible judge REMOVES the child from his loving PARENTS and awards custody to the LOW LIFE bio-"father" simply because he did not know he had impregnated the bio-mother.
I'm not saying money is evil. I'm saying money colors moral integrity. A poster said that something good resulted. My point is that it was about money, not goodness. You avoid the risk of allowing the love of money to corrupt these decisions by taking the ability to profit from it out of the equation. That's why you can't sell human organs. I think the same should apply to this. Buying and selling for profit is great, but there are places to draw lines: sex, babies, human organs, etc. There are a few things in life that shouldn't be seen as a commodity.
Well, I truly doubt that the 12 eggs she donated produced 12 children. I think less than 20% of these fertility treatments are sucessful, and usually than implant more than one embryo at a time.
Here's the moral absolute from my perspective: what about the left over human beings (fertilized eggs) that become superfluous after the end of the process?
I guess they're just destroyed. Or used for medical experimentation. Yeah, I have moral problem with that. And it's pretty much absolute.
I agree, that is why I am 100% opposed to IVF.
Click here.
Cheers!
To think of all the money I've thrown away. ;-) Actually IMHO, it's a good thing that young women can help out people that can't have their own children. Choosing life is almost always a good thing.
Let's add a more orwellian implication to this.
Let's assume that the technology gets to the point where it's easy to gestate human beings in vitro from a fertilized egg. Who controls the process? What happens if those in control decide to use it as an "efficient" way to produce human beings?
There is nothing to prevent those who control such a process from abusing those produced from the process. If human life becomes a mass produced commodity, at what point does it cease having anything but minimal economic value?
Clearly, this is something that's in the realm of science fiction right now. But fast forward technology 50-100 years, and you might see it.
I don't think it's even necessary to fast forward 50 years, twenty years ago the notion of cloning was seen as very distant, it is now reality. What you describe could probably be done TODAY with enough financial resources.
LOL
If she didn't even tell him he was a father, how much of an "angel" could she have been? The real screw-up in that case belongs to the state authorities, who are required to get the permission of both biological parents before allowing a child to be adopted. If the mother refused to tell the state who the father was, they should not have allowed the baby to be adopted; if she lied and said she was raped, then it's her fault not the state's. It IS possible, you know, that the father would have WANTED the baby, even if the mother had stopped being interested in the man. Of course, in our society she has the right to kill the baby before it is born because it is "her body", but that doesn't mean that, once the baby is born, she gets to hide from the father that the baby exists (assuming it was consensual sex and not rape).
But for all her brains and looks, she suffers from Oprah-itis ... she ain't married!
If having children is all about producing shining slices of genetic perfection, then this is just ... grand
"What you describe could probably be done TODAY with enough financial resources."
You're probably right.
You'll have FR mail in a few moments.
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