A Market for Human Eggs?

COLUMN By ANA LITA, Ph.D.

For HumanistNetworkNews.org

Some British scientists have suggested offering rebates to women seeking treatment in infertility clinics if they agree to give up some of their extra eggs to be used in stem-cell research. So if you are desperately trying to get pregnant but cannot afford the expensive treatment, giving up your extra eggs may be the only way to pay your medical expenses.

If this is moral, then why not open up the market to fertile women who are willing to sell their eggs directly to scientists? Proponents of the human egg market argue that rebates should be allowed because women, mostly college students, are already selling their eggs to help infertile people who want to become pregnant. They argue that the egg market is nothing new and that the risks associated with "egg farming" are no more risky than other things women do for money, such as work as soldiers or police officers.

The alternative, getting eggs from volunteers, does not work. The few infertility programs that have asked women to donate eggs have few donations. Science needs these eggs to move ahead. If exchanging money for them is necessary, so be it.

So why are women who sell their eggs, sometimes for as much as $50,000, still called "donors?" They have not donated anything! Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that we have a problem calling egg providers "sellers" because it implies that we have commodified sex and are paying people to reproduce.

Many people have no problem with a law that allows others to pay for sex; however, few will call this ethical and even fewer would recommend such a practice to their mothers, daughters or sisters. No one wants their sister or daughter working their way through college as an egg seller. Allowing the use of existing embryos for research is one thing, but enticing women to sell their eggs is something else entirely.

Egg sales and rebates are not an ethical route. Instead we could freeze eggs of women seeking infertility treatments and use these eggs once the women get pregnant, or ask women to donate their ovaries once they die. Egg markets should not be illegal, but we should not be fooled into thinking that they are ethical.

Ana Lita, Ph.D., is director of the IHEU-Appignani Center for Bioethics, an affiliate of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.