How much is a human egg worth? Should the government limit how much a donor can be paid? It used to be difficult to find
women willing to donate eggs, but now clinics have so many donors they can be selective.
Still, college newspapers and Internet sites solicit young women to sell eggs
for up to $10,000.
A year ago,
USA
Today reported:
Classified-ad Web site
Craigslist publishes 150 ads on a
typical day. A Web search for "egg donor" at
Google produces dozens
of links to advertisers.
You can go online and shop for an ideal donor --
look at this
list from a Chicago clinic as
an example.
Here is a California-based site that
offers 1,000 egg donors.The Associated Press reports:In 1996, women in federally
monitored programs donated eggs just over 3,800 times. That number has risen
steadily, to more than 10,000 in 2004, the most recent year for which the
Centers for Disease Control has compiled data.
A decade ago,
Dr. Joel Brasch, a
fertility specialist in the Chicago
area, had to work hard to recruit five or 10 young women for his own practice's
donor pool -- but not anymore.
The money is seen as compensation
for time and trouble. Among other things, donors learn to inject themselves
with hormones and, eventually, have a needle inserted through their vaginal
wall so eggs can be harvested.
The story adds:
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine, or ASRM, has set a
compensation guideline of $5,000, with a limit of $10,000 for special cases --
if, for instance, a recipient wants eggs of rare ancestry.
The president of the
Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology,
an affiliate of ASRM, argues that if women were just motivated by money, they
wouldn't get past the psychological screening to become a donor. And, he says,
researchers who've surveyed donors have found another strong motive.
"They're very altruistic and very
willing to help a couple who's trying to conceive," says
Dr. David
Grainger, who's also a reproductive endocrinologist at University
of Kansas medical school in Wichita.
Still, some egg brokers --
particularly those in the East and West -- are ignoring suggestions for a cap on
compensation, and paying women more.
"Egg
Donors Wanted" ads are common on the Internet,
in college
newspapers and on city trains. And with no federal laws limiting donor fees -- and fertility doctors conceding the difficulties of policing their own
industry -- one ethicist says that eggs have quickly become "commoditized."
Does the word "donor" properly describe someone who is paid thousands? The argument
in favor of compensation is that the donor is being paid for the surgery, not
the eggs.
The
New York Department of Health produced a useful FAQ page describing what is
involved in donation, how to watch out for scams and what the medical
implications may be.
An AP story earlier this
reported that a worldwide economy has sprung up for donor eggs:Belgian, Spanish and Greek clinics
court women on the Internet, flashing images of pregnant bellies, nursing
mothers, and frolicking families. They boast large donor pools and competitive
rates.
Online forums buzz with women discussing the reputations of foreign clinics and
offering advice and support. Associations have sprung up across France
that, for a small annual fee, help women connect with clinics abroad and
provide discounts to certain centers.
American women use seasoned French organizations to hook them up with clinics
in Greece or Spain.
Even with air fares and hotels, the costs can be just 10 percent of treatments
in the United States.
Couples looking for black donors, a rarity in any country, fly to African
clinics in Cameroon or Burkina
Faso.
Frozen sperm and eggs can be bought online, ordered from U.S.
storage banks by phone and shipped to clinics.
Experts caution that buyers need to be careful about the sources of eggs.
Troubles Inside Veterans' Hospitals
The
Washington Post sends up a
warning about the condition of the nation's leading veterans' hospital -- Walter
Reed. Five years of receiving war wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan is finally overwhelming that facility and presumably the one near you, too. If any story deserves your attention, this one does. It is not an indictment of the care veterans' hospitals provide, but of the patient crush they
are struggling to handle.
Daylight-Saving Time Fears
On March 11, three
weeks from now, most of America will switch to Daylight Saving Time. The switch, though, is coming three weeks earlier than usual. Lots of computers require a patch to get the time right this year.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
explains:
Bank deposits, stock trades, cell-phone bills,
online auctions: All could be affected by the earlier time change, according to
a report by the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm. Meanwhile, the
airline industry is raising the prospect of mass disruption in flight
schedules, especially with connecting flights to international routes. The
disruption posed by [the] daylight-saving switch, however, is still small-scale
compared with the Y2K scenario.
The
Arizona Republic explains what to do:
Microsoft planned to send its daylight-saving patch to
Windows PCs with the "automatic update" feature last week. Users with
automatic updates turned off should download the patch from Microsoft. (New
machines running Windows Vista are immune because Vista
was finalized after the 2005 law passed.)
However, computers running anything older than the most recent version of
Windows XP, known as Service Pack 2, no longer get this level of tech support.
Owners of those PCs should go into the control panel and unclick the setting
that tells the machine to automatically change the clock for daylight-saving
time.
If you store [your] appointments in Microsoft Outlook or other desktop-based
calendar programs -- rather than dynamic, Web-based programs such as Google Calendar -- the situation gets trickier. Patches for calendar programs are available, but
appointments entered before a patch was applied may still be registered in
standard time rather than daylight time -- off by an hour.
Packing HeatThe
Birmingham (Ala.) News says an astonishing 1 in ten adults in the paper's
metro area may be carrying a concealed gun.
Al's Morning Multimedia
The Ventura County (Calif.) Star did a nice job yesterday on
a report about new frontiers in cancer treatment. The paper says there are
nearly 650 new drugs being developed that give cancer patients diverse options
beyond chemo.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's
Note: Al's Morning Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story
excerpts and other materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as
original concepts and analysis. When the information comes directly
from another source, it will be attributed and a link will be provided
whenever possible. The column is fact-checked, but depends upon the
accuracy and integrity of the original sources cited. Errors and
inaccuracies found will be corrected.
Doesn't the dispensation of a woman's eggs fall under the...
