College students seeking to pay their bills may be tempted by
egg donor agency advertisements with five-figure compensation
values.
Egg donor agencies and donor banks seeking young women commonly
place daily advertisements in college newspapers, such as the Daily
Bruin.
“We like the donors to be young because we get the best
response with younger donors,” said William Freije, professor
in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the UCLA David
Geffen School of Medicine.
After people choose a donor from an agency, the agency explains
the process of donation and the risks involved in donating the
eggs, said Mary Lathus, who donated eggs 12 years ago and is
director of Conceptual Options, an egg donation and surrogacy
center .
The donor is then given a thorough physical exam and genetic
family history analysis as well as a psychological evaluation.
When it is clear that the woman understands that she is donating
her eggs and will not want to seek out the child, and when
satisfactory results have been obtained from the genetic history,
the process of egg retrieval begins.
A variety of hormones are given to the donor to stimulate egg
growth. Once the ovarian follicles are mature, ovulation is
triggered and the eggs are collected with a needle under general
anesthesia.
“The ovaries get stimulated and as far as we can tell
there is no long-term problem in doing that, but the donors are
given these medicines which are very powerful,” Freije
said.
But there are some risks involved when the eggs are
retrieved.
“Any time you put a needle in a structure you risk
infection and bleeding. If someone were to bleed a lot, a
transfusion of blood would be necessary,” Freije said.
“There is also the risk associated with the general
anesthesia.”
Fewer than one in 1,000 women will need major surgery due to
complications during the egg retrieval process, according to the
American Society for Reproductive Medicine Web site.
Generally the donor agencies and recipients seek two types of
women for this process.
“The first group they are looking for are younger
college-age women who maybe need a little help with their tuition
… and the second group is young mothers,” said Rene
Almeling, a graduate sociology student who has been researching the
topic for four years.
Advertisements specify a couples’ requests in categories
such as education, height, physical appearance and medical
background. While one advertisement wants the donor to have scored
a 1400 or higher on the SAT, another advertisement specifies that
the egg donor have modeling experience.
“They are really interested in women who have a high level
of education … and they want the women to be attractive,”
Almeling said.
Lathus said donors give a variety of reasons for wanting to
donate their eggs and generally their purpose is to assist an
infertile couple conceive as well as to earn extra money.
“I didn’t connect the risk to the
compensation,” Lathus said of the decision to donate her own
eggs. “This didn’t require a lot of time and effort and
I thought it was amazing.”
Lathus said girls may be looking through the classifieds for a
part-time job. “She might say, “˜Here is something I can
do, maybe I don’t have to work this semester and just go to
school,’ but then the outlook is also very altruistic to
help,” Lathus said.
There are currently 2.1 million couples with infertility issues
in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control
Web site.
The monetary compensation for egg donors is generally between
$5,000 and $10,000.
This value is larger when certain ethnicities are sought where
the donor pool is small. Some people will offer tens of thousands
of dollars for a near-perfect donor.
In comparison, sperm donors are given $75 per sample. While men
have an unlimited supply of sperm, women are born with a finite
number of eggs which they lose through menstruation every month,
and the quality of the eggs decrease over time. In addition, women
are placed on medication to surgically retrieve the eggs and men
are not.
“While it is more physically invasive for a woman (as a
donor), it does require a lot of time and energy on part of the
sperm donor. … The egg donors are paid no matter how many eggs
they produce and whether they produce any eggs at all,”
Almeling said.
The compensation has increased in value over the past
decade.
“My sister and I were donors in college and we were
compensated $1,000 and that was a lot. The norm was $500, and
we’re talking about 12 years ago,” Lathus said.
Once the women apply to be egg donors and are placed on the
agency’s Web site, it can takes months to be selected by a
couple.
“I feel it is her body and I will counsel and advise her
but it has to be her decision,” Lathus said.