A discussion of the issues surrounding the sale of human eggs was a part of Princeton University’s undergraduate bioethics conference.
By: Paul Esforms
The moral and ethical issues surrounding human egg donation are no further removed from public discourse than the classified advertisements of area newspapers, said Dr. Ruth Macklin, professor of bioethics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, during a speech Friday at Princeton University.
Dr. Macklin cited classified ads from The New York Times and the Daily Princetonian, the university’s student newpaper, offering tens of thousands of dollars for egg donations to spark an examination of the ethical dilemmas of infertility practices.
Dr. Macklin examined the ethical basis for public policy to regulate "reproductive commerce."
The motivation for and compensation of the egg-donors or "egg-vendors," as she termed them have been hotly contested items for feminists, ethicists and policy-makers because of their exploitative and commercializing potential, she said.
Her address was the keynote lecture in an undergraduate bioethics conference, sponsored by the Student Bioethics Forum of Princeton University. The audience of conference attendees included many of the healthy, college-educated young women to whom the ads are aimed.
Though Dr. Macklin sought to apply objective ethical tests to the issue and made frequent comparisons to other medical practices, such as sperm, blood and organ donation, it seemed that even she could not help but reveal her misgivings.
"My conclusion is that no one is likely to be harmed by commercializing egg donation. Yet even if individuals are not harmed, there may be harm to the fabric of society, an admittedly vague principle," she said.
Compensation to egg donors and surrogate mothers has risen dramatically over the years, from $2,000 in 1988 to as high as $50,000 today, she said.
While working at an infertility institute in the early 1990s, Dr. Macklin and her colleagues were forced to double their compensation rate in order to match competitors. She pointed out that California has tried to pass legislation to set a $5,000 limit on compensation and end the practice of having couples choose from photo albums of prospective donors.
"To many feminist thinkers, egg donation and surrogacy are forms of class exploitation, where wealthy couples pay women from lower economic classes to carry their babies," she said. "But wealthy women also pay poor women to clean their houses. Should we prohibit this?"
The practice itself is difficult to separate from the unsavory principles of class exploitation and commercialization that it seems to endorse, Dr. Macklin concluded, adding that although these infertility procedures appear to operate under free choice and market principles, their skyrocketing prices create unequal access and risk turning human life into a luxury item.