selling eggs for money- eggsploitation?

When I was twenty years old and desperate for traveling money, I saw an advertisement for $8,000-$12,00 compensation for egg donation on the back of a newspaper. I understood that the production of female eggs was much more energetically expensive than sperm and that the process of extraction was a bit more complex (hence why one could receive $8000-$12000) but I did not fully comprehend the implications of going through an egg donation procedure. Two months, and a thirty-page packet later I found myself in an office in Marin for my final interview as a potential egg donor. The clinic emphasized to me the altruistic qualities of being a donor, ya know, helping infertile couples have children and yadda yadda. I genuinely believed I was doing something good for someone else, without actually considering the short-term/long-term physical/mental health effects. I would essentially be taking hormone boosting shots for about a month and then having 10-20 eggs extracted from my ovaries, I would then mark 'yes' or 'no' on a sheet of paper for wanting to stay informed on the status of my eggs or keep in contact with the parents who would have my child. In addition, the medical concerns I did have about the hormone treatment I would be receiving were not properly acknowledged by the clinic and I was reassured that complications were rare. My profile was put up on their website and I was never contacted again. In retrospect, I am incredibly grateful that for whatever reason I was not chosen to go through with the procedure.

In the last three years, I have done extensive research and have spoken with many women about this topic. I have come to many disturbing conclusions and unanswered questions about the industry, the egg donation process and its negligence to women's reproductive health. What I have been noticing recently is that egg donation advertisements are becoming more and more prevalent, especially around school campuses. The industry is targeting college girls, between 18-29, who are healthy, attractive and in need of some cash.

From the USA today article by Jim Hopkins Egg-donor business booms on campus :

"We are selling children," Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar says in a new book, The Baby Business. Spar wants a national debate on bringing order and safety to an industry in which spending on everything from fertility drugs to eggs has mushroomed to an estimated $3 billion a year.

Over the past ten years this market has become incredibly profitable, but are the thousands of women who go through this procedure being properly treated during and after all is said and done? Are they being informed about the risks of taking the hormone Lupron and the actual egg extraction process? Is there research being conducted on the long-term health effects?

physical health effects

  
From a Time Magazine article, As Egg Donations Mount, So Do Health Concerns
"Doctors say there is no biological reason that donating eggs would cause infertility, but they also cannot say for sure that it doesn't. The long-term health effects of egg donation have never actually been studied, in large part because the high cost of studies doesn't "seem justified in terms of what the possible risks [of the procedure] might be," according to Sean Tipton, spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM)" 


 In addition to a lack of research for long-term effects of egg extraction, no long-term testing has been done on the effects of injecting Lupron as the hormone treatment for stimulation of the ovaries. Lupron has been FDA approved to treat endometriosis and anemia related problems but not to treat women involved in egg donation. If this is true why is it legal to inject thousands of women with Lupron for assisted reproductive technologies? 
Lupron's negative health effects are across the board very disturbing, they include:::: headache and migraine, dizziness, severe joint pain, difficulty breathing, chest pain, nausea, depression, emotional instability, dimness of vision, fainting, amnesia, hypertension, muscular pain, bone pain, bone loss, nausea/vomiting, asthma, abdominal pain, chronic enlargement of the thyroid, liver function abnormality, and vision abnormality. It has caused many documented cases of hospitalization and even death.


From The National Women's Health Network,
"There have been no prospective or clinical studies on Lupron®’s safety for ART patients and the FDA has not approved Lupron® for use in infertility treatment or assisted reproduction procedures such as IVF."

"Lupron® is an “antineoplastic agent”, meaning that it is a cancer chemotherapy drug. Like all antineoplastics, Lupron® is harmful to both cancerous and non-cancerous cells — particularly to pregnant women and developing fetuses. In addition to the harmful side-effects reported by women using Lupron® for its approved uses, there are concerns about its effects when used as part of assisted reproductive technologies, such as IVF. "


Hyper stimulation of the ovaries is also very common among women who go through the procedure.


 psychological health effects


In addition to the disturbing effects of taking Lupron, there are many other psychological issues that come to surface for many donors in regards to not knowing what family the eggs went to and if some kid would come knocking on their door in the future, in search of their biological mother. When I was sure I wanted to go through with the procedure at twenty years old, I didn't understand this type of emotional predicament or hardship, It is hard to believe that any young college girl really could. There is also the consistent worry that your children later in life will unknowingly fall in love with their sibling, extreme yes, but definitely possible. Is it alright for a nineteen or twenty-year old to merely check a yes or no box which will forever determine their ability to stay in contact with the clinic/new potential parents of their child?


   According to a survey taken by the journal of Fertility and Sterility, they examined 80 women from 20 states who had donated eggs from two to 15 years earlier. Participants, whose average age was 30, completed a detailed questionnaire. The researchers found that 16% of women complained of subsequent physical symptoms and 20% reported lasting psychological effects after donation.


 In addition to this, another problem that has arisen involves clinics not telling women where the unused eggs are going: of the 66 clinics that sent in a consent form and said they used excess embryos for research, just 20 told women about that. And only three of 38 clinics that used some embryos for stem cell research in particular disclosed that to donors. This could also be psychologically damaging to some women who have strong moral beliefs against stem cell research.



From Time:
"Right now egg donors are treated like vendors, not as patients. Patients need to be followed up," says internist Jennifer Schneider, who has been advocating for the government to track egg donors since 2007, a few years after her daughter, a three-time egg donor, died of colon cancer at age 31. "After the first few days of being discharged from the IVF clinic and seeing that there were no immediate consequences, they are never contacted again."

This industry needs to be regulated to expose the emerging problems and long-term health effects for the women who put their bodies through the procedure. It seems pretty absurd that the American government feels a need to regulate the termination of pregnancies and not the production of them.