The "Egg Donors Are People Too" Story

A couple weeks ago, I participated in a panel discussion entitled "Egg Donors Are People Too," which was part of a fertility conference at the Grand Central Hyatt (a quite nice hotel). The woman moderating the panel was a psychiatrist (maybe a psychologist, I forget) specializing in fertility issues. She was beautifully dressed and coiffed and had a sort of blue-blooded air about her, as though, despite having an enviable job, she didn't actually need to work. She was the one who named the panel.

Things got off to, in my view, a hilarious start when Dr. Upper Class began with a poignant paean to egg donors, women who really care about other people's infertility and are so giving of their time and of themselves. Because, of course, no one would go through all that just for the money!

And then the floor was turned over to me, to introduce myself and talk -- in a teary, estrogen-fueled sort of way, I imagine -- about what it meant to donate eggs.

"Of course," I began, "when we say 'donating,' we're not really donating at all. That's why all the ads in the Village Voice prominently list how many thousands of dollars the gig pays." Some egg professionals in the audience looked stricken.

I then spent the next ten minutes metaphorically pointing at the white elephant in the room and jumping up and down, saying the same thing I always say: women are adults who can make their own decisions in a market economy. If our bodies are our own, then we can make economic decisions about them as well. Men can choose to endanger their health working in coal mines; women can choose to inject themselves with hormones for cash. (Imagine a blue-blooded society woman claiming "No one would go underground in those dirty pits and mine coal and risk black lung disease just for $25,000 a year! Surely these kind souls must really care that rich people need to burn fuel for energy!)

Egg donors aren't heartless people who don't care about infertility, I pointed out, but seriously, but I think a lot more broke twenty-year old women apply their altruistic instincts towards, say, Darfur, or global warming, or AIDS in Africa, than towards the inability of American couples to conceive. And rightly so. What kind of arrogance does it take to think that, when typically lower-middle-class women donate eggs to upper-middle-class buyers, it's not about the money?

On the question of whether $8,000 is enough to go through all the hormones, I said that, towards the end when it was two injections a day and lots of PMS-type side effects, I simply took the amount of money I was still owed, divided it by the number of injections remaining, and told myself that figure every time I had an injection to do. The number was over $100. Was I, and had I always been, in an economic position such that I felt that a worthwhile exchange? Obviously. That's why I signed up to do it.

Of course, it's not entirely about the money. It's also about a desire to spread my genes anywhere I can, just as men have always done, and male hip-hop artists regularly rap about. That ("I'd like to knock you all up, quite frankly") didn't go over so well at the panel either, at least among the organizers. However, a number of people-trying-to-be-parents came up to me afterwards and thanked me for making them laugh. (If only "comedian on call" could be my title! Of course, it's easy to make people laugh when you're the only comedian in the room and no one is expecting a comedian).


On a related note, a Melbourne IVF clinic is
offering a children's book explaining egg donor conception.
The title sounds just a bit dirty though, doesn't it?

(I donated eggs to a gay man in 2005. For my previous egg donation posts, go here).