An Awful Alternative to Work-Study

Every day during my trek up the stairs to the seventh floor of Hamilton, I have ample time to ponder the egg-donation posters on every landing's bulletin board. The most common sign features a pretty blonde with curly hair. She is smiling because, apparently, she helped a woman become a mother. Next to her plump, healthy cheeks, the sign reads, "Make up to $30,000 for college!"

Mid-semester, when I was getting low on cash, this sounded pretty damn good. According to Go Ask Alice, I probably have about 300,000 eggs left in my ovaries. I am not planning on using them all, so why shouldn't someone else enjoy them? So, I typed a few words into Google and checked out a preliminary donor interest form on the University of Pennsylvania's Web site. It was easy. I just had to reveal, among other things, my educational information, family history of genetic abnormalities, weight, substance-abuse habits, criminal history, and if I had tattoos. If I submitted the form, the program would call me back if they were interested. My interest was piqued. I went online and looked at some other donation programs. Some actually wanted me to write an essay, include a childhood photograph, and list my hobbies and interests in my application so egg recipients could line up profiles of candidates and make their choice. Apparently this was necessary so that parents could end up with a baby that looked like them, but if parents randomly wanted a 6-foot-tall, green-eyed, future engineer of Hungarian descent who is a talented pole-vaulter, they could probably "shop" for those eggs. It strikes me how creepy it is that parents then have the power to choose the genes that their child inherits.

All of these Web sites offered "generous" financial compensation and touted promises of changing another woman's life, but there was no flat payment. Different women's eggs have different values. I realized that my college-girl eggs were a hot commodity. I am probably a perfect candidate for donation. I am young, healthy, of average height, blonde, blue-eyed, and free of tattoos, and I have great SAT scores. Who wouldn't want my adorable Ivy League baby?

Yes, donating eggs means that some little person who doesn't belong to me will be walking around with half of my genes. This made me a bit uncomfortable, even just to think about. While people can donate their liver, bone marrow, or blood, this was obviously not of the same genre. Egg "donation" is actually a sale. It is the transfer of a commodity that results in the creation of a human life. While lucrative (payment ranges from about $5,000 to up to $30,000, depending on the donor's profile), the donation process is difficult. Let's pretend you are a college girl who needs cash and wants to donate. First, you have to fit a certain desirable egg-donor image. Egg donation is not an equal-opportunity employer. There is not a big market for women who are racially mixed or who have red hair, or any other sort of minority characteristic. And, apparently, SAT scores are indicative of the quality of women's genes. If you fit the genetic mix that donor programs want, and manage to get through the initial stages of being commoditized so that a family can accept or reject your profile, you are then turned into an egg factory.

I'll give you the general outline: first you take medication to stop your normal menstrual cycle so it can synchronize with the egg recipient's. Then you give yourself hormonal injections every day for weeks in order to hyper-stimulate your ovaries into making extra egg-containing follicles. When these eggs mature, you receive a transvaginal ovarian aspiration, which is a surgical procedure in which an ultrasound probe with a needle on the end is inserted in your vagina and used to suck the eggs out of each follicle. Yes, this whole process is painful and has extensive side effects. Although egg donation is relatively safe in the short term, if something goes wrong, the result can be deadly. It is also as yet unclear what the long-term hormonal and reproductive effects of egg donation are for the donor.

But for thousands of dollars, apparently many women do not have concerns about this. Of the more than 100,000 women who donate eggs every year, many are college students who saw fliers like the one in Hamilton. Even Craigslist advertises egg donation.

A woman could make the argument that eggs are not essential to her bodily function, that they are expendable, and that because she owns them, she has a right to sell them when she needs the extra cash. Obviously, college students are great targets for egg-donation advertising. We are young, smart, healthy, and broke. We are also not usually thinking about our long-term plans to have babies, so after responding to advertisements, we have less hesitation when the risks are explained to us.

I think it is wonderful that infertile women can have a shot at giving birth to their "own" baby using egg donation. Yet, I have to question the practice. Asking a friend or family member to donate eggs is one thing-although this is still much more extreme than your typical organ donation-but the system of anonymous donation that targets college students is quite a different story. This practice turns a woman into a profile on a piece of paper, pumps her full of hormones, removes her eggs, and creates a child whom she will probably never know. This is especially worrisome when my fellow female students are being pinpointed as donors. Although California and Britain have put limits on the number of donation cycles a woman can participate in, for the rest of the world, there is no limit to how many times a woman can donate her eggs. So for students who need money, egg donation is a viable option.

While college girls may be great donor candidates, it is unfair to offer money to women in financially vulnerable positions in exchange for something so personal and potentially dangerous, especially when the process is selective based on lines of physical and mental characteristics. As much as I'd love to make $30,000, I would rather not be reduced to a set of genes on a piece of paper. I hope that the posters in Hamilton are not the harbinger of an egg market that will be even more anonymous and objectifying than the existing one.