Charlotte Cowles

PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER SHAY

“GG DONORS NEEDED. $20K + all expenses. We are seeking women who are attractive, under the age of 29, SAT 1300+ (math+verbal), physically fit and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. If you have a desire to help an infertile family and would like more info, please contact us.” This advertisement can often be found gracing the pages of the Columbia Daily Spectator, aimed specifically at young Ivy League women.

The Columbia campus is crawling with smart, driven, and successful women – many of whom are also pretty, tall, white, and at the most fertile age of their lives. Moreover, they are all about to enter the scary world of post-college poverty, facing entry-level salaries and student debt. When offered up to $50,000 for their eggs, the prospect is at least tempting for many students, especially since fertility and childbearing are at the back of their minds, while careers and future rent checks demand priority.

However, there is a popular stigma against the ads for egg donors: on a diverse campus where liberal social ideals are considered the norm, most students are wary – and in some cases, horrified – by the advertised “compensation” for the eggs of a pretty white girl. Racial attitudes aside, the idea of a monetary value being placed on eggs according to the education, looks, and SAT score of their supplier strikes many as morally wrong. Molly Hassenfelt, a tall, blond senior at Columbia, is disturbed by the prospect of “selling” her genetic material for the top dollar some parents might be willing to pay: “You can’t put a monetary value on what you want your child to be. It’s not a material thing.”

“I am a 21-year-old student at Columbia University… I am a healthy female with a good family history of fertility and would love to provide someone with the ability to have children. I am a 5’8” athletic white female with brown hair and hazel eyes. I have had no major health problems to speak of …”

So began the response I wrote to Andie, who put a private advertisement in the Columbia Daily Spectator seeking an egg donor. In addition to my race (Caucasian), I told her my SAT scores, GPA, and family health history.

Andie replied to my e-mail within an hour. “Thank you for your response to my ad,” she wrote. She explained that she was a successful psychotherapist living in Manhattan and had lost her ovaries during a botched operation years earlier. She would be willing to pay for a top doctor for the egg donation procedure. “Would you be willing to send a picture?” she asked.

Now I began to feel guilty. What if, by some fluke, I fit the mental and physical description she was searching for? What if she actually wanted me to be her donor? What if I actually had to say “no” to a woman who thought I could give her a child?

I didn’t hear from Andie for a few days after I sent her my picture. Finally, an e-mail from her arrived with an attachment. Andie told me, very nicely, that she was looking for “a closer match to me physically.” She had enclosed a picture of herself. She was pale-skinned, with very light blond hair and blue eyes. She looked nothing like me at all.

American women, on average, now wait longer to marry and have children than ever before: increasing focus on their careers have drawn them away from childbearing at a young age, and improvements in birth control have allowed them to choose to put off pregnancy until later on in their lives. Science shows fertility to begin decreasing after women reach the age of 30 and to decline as much as 95 percent by age 45. Today, one in 10 couples is infertile.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, couples are deemed infertile if they have been unable to conceive after a year of trying. Some couples can be helped with fertility drugs; others use in-vitro fertilization (IVF) with their own eggs and sperm and are thus still able to produce their own biological children; however, some women cannot ovulate and must turn to egg donors.

The National Institute of Health reports that Caucasians are far more likely to seek treatment for infertility than African American or Hispanic couples. Moreover, of the Caucasian women who seek treatment, only 37.3 percent had a household income of under $100,000, and 13.2 percent had less than a four-year college degree. Therefore, the average woman seeking medical help for her infertility is white and well educated – and wealthy enough to pay for what she wants, which in this case, is an egg from a donor just like herself.

DRAWING: SARAH LOH

A Perfect Match, Inc. is an Internet-based egg “brokerage” business run by Thomas and Darlene Pinkerton of San Diego. It garnered nationwide press in 1999, when the Pinkertons placed an ad in Ivy League college newspapers offering $50,000 for a donor that matched high SAT score and height requirements. Thomas Pinkerton defended the ad on CNN. “We weren’t looking for publicity,” he said. “We were just looking [on behalf of] a client, who I guess was one of the first not to be able to find what they were looking for. They were a very tall family who were highly educated. They were looking for a very tall person who was highly educated.”

Darlene Pinkerton, who is herself infertile and was able to have a baby using IVF in 1990, explains that A Perfect Match, Inc. was founded to supplement the scant options available to infertile women searching for egg donors. She explained in an interview that her clients are smart and successful and want their children to feel a sense of comfort and belonging in their home environment. “Intelligence is very important to [our clients],” she said. “They’re just concerned that in the high-pressure corporate world or whatever [it is] that they’re used to, a child that doesn’t at least have a chance of being pretty intelligent wouldn’t fit in with their family.”

The controversy of “choosing” one’s genetic material can also swing in the opposite direction; an upcoming article in the journal Fertility and Sterility explains how some parents specifically choose to have children who share their disability, such as deafness or dwarfism. New scientific technology allows doctors to test embryos for genetic mutations, and a small fraction of potential parents (three percent) make use of the technology to pick and choose an embryo that will give them a child with the same disabilities as their own. The Washington Post Magazine featured a deaf, infertile couple from Maryland who solicited sperm banks in search of a deaf donor to increase their chances of conceiving a deaf child. “A hearing baby would be a blessing,” Ms. Duchesneau, the mother-to-be, was quoted as saying. “A deaf baby would be a special blessing.”

Dr. Robert J. Stillman of the Shady Grove Fertility Center in Maryland believes that using fertility technology to select mutated genetic material is unethical. “In general, one of the prime dictates of parenting is to make a better world for our children,” he said in an interview. “Dwarfism and deafness are not the norm.” The online magazine Slate was more direct in its denunciation of this use of the procedure, calling it “the deliberate crippling of children.”

However, most doctors agree that the decision is ultimately up to the parents. Even those unwilling to practice such “crippling” procedures, such as Dr. Stillman, are not opposed to sending families to other doctors who might consent. Dr. Darshak M. Sanghavi, a pediatric cardiologist, feels that it is not her job to judge what parents want for their children. “As a physician who helps women dealing with complex fetal diseases, I’ve learned to respect a family’s judgment,” she writes. “Many parents share a touching faith that having children similar to them will strengthen family and social bonds.”

Dr. Sanghavi also points out that sharing characteristics such as height or disability may not necessarily create closer families. “But it’s not for me to say,” she adds.

The Pinkertons acknowledge that the ethics of reproductive science can be daunting. “But it should be, because it’s new,” Thomas Pinkerton insisted in a San Diego newspaper. “But we try to keep our eye on the ball, which is the infertile couple. How do we assist them in a way that’s ethical, in away that meets their needs?”

When a donor has been selected, the long process of donation has only just begun. The procedure, which takes several months in total and requires six weeks of daily hormone injections prior to surgery, is no walk in the park. In the weeks leading up to the surgery, the donor must also forgo sexual intercourse and heavy exercise; she must also endure common side effects of the hormones, which usually include weight gain, moodiness, and bloating.

When the date of her operation approaches, the donor is given additional hormones and is required to have blood tests and ultrasounds every few days so that doctors can monitor the state of her eggs (their size, quantity, etc.). For medical reasons, these tests must be conducted between the hours of 7 and 9 A.M.

When the doctors have deemed the eggs mature and ready for “harvesting,” the donor is given several medications within 48 hours of the procedure, which itself takes about an hour. The eggs are harvested, mixed with the sperm of the recipient’s partner, and then injected into the recipient. Usually, to ensure the safety and “comfort” of the eggs, both the donor and the recipient undergo their end of the procedure in the same clinic on the same day.

In addition to requiring a substantial time commitment, the procedure also involves a certain level a risk. There is a five-percent chance of a donor’s ovaries being damaged while the eggs are being harvested. While many women in their early twenties are more focused on preventing pregnancy than planning for it, the idea of losing the ability to have children is jarring enough to scare them away from the procedure.

While all fertility clinics compensate their donors, the going rate is far below the $20,000 Ivy League payment, usually falling around $5,000 at the average American clinic. These clinics usually have a database of donors from which infertile couples can choose, and offer far more affordable services to those in need than the likes of A Perfect Match, Inc.

Women in the less pricey databases are those who fit the physical and medical requirements of the specific clinic (usually they fall within a relatively flexible range of age, height, SAT scores, etc.) and have expressed interest in donating. The infertile parents can then choose a donor who best fulfills their wishes for the genes of their child.

The $5,000 sum has been calculated by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) Ethics Committee, based on what they believe to be appropriate payment for the donors’ time and effort. David Adamson, MD, Vice-President of ASRM, writes, “It is essential that egg donors be fairly compensated. The procedure asks a lot of them: to conscientiously follow a strict schedule of injections and to undergo some uncomfortable, sometimes painful procedures.” While the ASRM Web site admits that “there is not consensus on the precise payment that oocyte donors should receive,” there is a strong belief that offering high amounts of money will attract donors for the wrong reasons. Moreover, the value placed on donors’ looks and intelligence is specifically discouraged. “Compensation based on donors’ personal attributes is not justifiable,” Dr. Adamson states firmly.

Margaret Hollister, director of national infertility organization RESOLVE, believes that such high compensation rates send the wrong public message about egg donation. “These high dollar amounts make it seem more coercive. In other words, harder to pass up,” she said in an interview. “It should really be more of a voluntary process.” The fact that people are willing to pay top dollar for “top” eggs makes the process look like “baby selling” – an accusation that everyone in the fertility field (as well as the infertile parents) would like to avoid.

Despite in the ethical debate surrounding the compensation amount, it undeniably serves as an important factor in attracting prospective donors. Tiny Treasures, LLC, an online-based egg donation agency, offers assistance to parents wishing to place specialty advertisements seeking egg donors. The agency’s Web site recommends placing the offered compensation front and center in the ad. “College students get bombarded with Egg Donor advertisements on a regular basis, so your goal is to catch their attention,” the Web site warns. “We have found that advertisements that do not list compensation tend to receive few to no responses from Prospective Donors.”

Based on a rough estimate of the total number of hours it would take for one egg donation procedure (from the start of the medication process and the end of the actual harvesting, not including travel time) a $5,000 paycheck would land a donor about $70-$80 per hour (not including time spent traveling for the operation or being screened for the process). While this sounds like a lot, it pales in comparison to the tuition of classes alone at an Ivy League college, where each student pays approximately $100 per hour of class. However, as an in-state student at a state college, students pay closer to $30 per hour of class.

Viewed in this light, the full-time Ivy League students’ hour is “worth” more than that of a state university student. While these figures in no way indicate anything about the worth of their character or genes, it is one argument for the fact that people might be willing to pay more for people whose time is of significant monetary value.

The same applies to good looks: a well known 1993 study, “Beauty and the Labor Market,” found that people with above-average looks earned a wage premium of about five percent, while those with a below-average appearance earned approximately nine percent less than the norm. Therefore, pretty donors’ time, when seen from a capitalist standpoint, is worth more than the average donors’ hours as well. For height, a study at the University of Florida found that each extra inch meant an additional $789 in yearly income (even when gender, weight, and age were taken into account).

The market for human eggs makes us uncomfortable—but it is only, after all, obeying the logic of American capitalism.

While Andie turned down my eggs, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit rejected. Would she have wanted me if I were, say, blonder, or smarter, or prettier? Was I not good enough? I realized quickly that these thoughts were ridiculous; she wasn’t hiring me for a job, or accepting me to a school – she was looking for a baby. A baby in whom she can see herself, not someone else. I could not blame her.