Yesterday we blogged about the possibility that egg donor compensation might be tripled in the UK. We also took note that this meant a rise from 250 to 750 British Pound. Which is still a lot less compensation than you get in most other countries, but British authorities are keeping a mandatory cap on compensation for ethical reasons.
Well, now it’s true: the official going rate for an egg donor in the UK is now £750. Hurray! Not that it really matters that much if you think about it.
Zoe Williams has published an article in the Guardian titled Expenses for egg donors, or profit? Depends on whether you have ovaries.
The worry with body components is that people who are desperate will jeopardise their health without realising, having been blinded to the risks by dire financial circumstances. It’s a more straightforward case, aimed at protecting the poor, but it does make me think: if you’re that worried about the pressures of poverty, why not focus on social justice? Why would you concentrate on the hypothetical health risk to a hypothetically struggling egg donor?
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By which I mean, I don’t really believe it. I think this is a smokescreen for a paternalistic worldview in which any decision a woman makes about her own reproductive organs is bound to be freighted with a (peculiar) combination of idiocy and Machiavellianism. Too much money may confuse and excite her, leading her to make poor choices. Nevertheless, even though I divine this tacit misogynistic subtext, I do agree with the stated objection: we can’t start harvesting body parts for money. The flow of life’s advantages, from poor to rich, has already gone far enough.
So if this new £750 sum were a move in the direction of selling babies, or human components, it would be egregious. However, you need only look at the mechanics of egg donation to realise that the figure could be 10 times that amount and still constitute reasonable expenses.
Zoe is on point there. Any country in the world where there is no regulation about donating eggs, you can’t find an egg donor for that amount of money. Even in developing nations like India the prices are considerably higher. Why? Because it’s not as easy as donating sperm…
There’s a tendency to talk about this as if it were as easy as gum balls flying out of a slot machine; but if it were re-termed “an IVF process without a baby at the end”, its inconveniences might be taken a little more seriously. The drugs to stimulate egg production carry some risk to health, so the compensation should be seen as an insurance against lost earnings in the immediate or long term. As a friend said of pregnancy: “You get fat and you can’t drink, which are the worst two things that can happen to a woman”. It may in the case of egg donation last only six weeks, rather than nine months, but you don’t have to be a body double for this to interfere with the smooth running of your life and work.
The article is interesting and I recommend you read it.
And the Telegraph has also a short comment on the subject, which consists mainly of a statement of a woman who wants to give birth with the help of an egg donor.
"I was devastated and so was my husband after being told by my fertility specialist at age 38 that I had no option but to consider adoption or donor eggs (according to my doctor I was out of eggs and gave me 4% chance of getting pregnant and a 2% chance of carrying a baby to full term). After much research and dozens of hours reading infertility related articles and posts online, I have found your book! [...] After one month of trying I became pregnant and had a beautiful healthy boy. Nine months after that I did everything in your book again and after 2 months of trying I got pregnant again and gave birth to another perfect little boy."
