I had heard all my life about sperm donation and sperm bank jokes. Someone told me that it was "50 bucks a pop." It seemed mildly amusing how men could get paid in exchange for a small sample of such an abundant physiological resource. It wasn't until sometime in the past couple of years I heard about women donating their ova to infertile couples. I couldn't believe this was a medical possibility. I became excited and thought, "There are so many couples who want to have children and I have so many eggs to spare!" Knowing that, the financial compensation seemed worth the hormonal treatments and pain.
Before you accuse me of exploiting myself, I must say that I have pondered the ethical ramifications of such an act. To my knowledge, no one associates sperm donation with eugenics. So why does the eugenics debate enter into the ethics of ova donation? Perhaps popular opinion is influenced by the thought that women choose donors who are physically and mentally "perfect." The advertisements run in newspapers seek an egg donor who is a 5'10", blond supermodel who got no less than a 1600 on her SATs. Without prior knowledge of the prospective recipients, people are likely to think that the recipient is looking to create the "perfect" baby and is taking advantage of a "better" gene pool.
In 1997, Ellen Blackwell at the University of California-Berkeley did research on the reasons that infertile couples use the ova dontation process. She found that no interviewee indicated that a donor was superior to the recipient mother in appearance, intelligence, education or medical history-fertility issues excluded. Although most prospective parents considered education and intelligence important donor criteria, donors were neither better educated nor demonstrably more intelligent. Generally, a recipient's list of donor criteria was remarkably correlated with the self-image of the recipient mother.(http://www.mcnair.berkeley.
edu/97Journal/Blackwell.html)
Many radical feminists portray reproductive technology as men and the medical establishment using prospective mothers as pawns. Actually, prospective mothers are normally the driving forces behind infertility treatment. Women are recipients of both donated sperm and ova. An infertile woman is ultimately the one who chooses to have a child, not her husband. If anything, reproductive technology is a victory for many feminists.
People ask me if I would feel strange knowing that the child would have my genes. Yes, reproductive power is precious, but to me, genes themselves are simply biological information. Can't legal guardians take good care of their children even if they do not share genetic information with them? Actually, the association of parent and child as genetically linked is a relatively modern phenomenon. Before the Industrial Revolution, people other than parents often brought up children. "Adoption" of this sort happened in cases of apprenticship, child abandonment and death of the parents, to name a few.
How about fashion models becoming well-paid egg donors? This is obviously exploitation of reproductive power. Making ova a commodity is stepping into dangerous territory. Ova donation and reception should only take place in a personal, private environment such as a clinic, where recipients and donors can both feel comfortable and well informed about their decisions. Aside from the possible incorporation of egregious consumerism into the ova donation process, I am not shaken by the ethics argument against ova donation. I still believe that ova donation is a wonderful, self-sacrificing thing to do to help an infertile couple become parents.
It's not that women or medical professionals seek to play God. Couples just want to have a child who best reflects the mother. I believe that God has allowed such medical technology for our benefit. Obviously, God gave doctors the skill to transplant organs, drive away diseases and monitor unborn children. Reproductive technology is a blessing to infertile couples-a modern-day miracle. We only need to make sure that we do not exploit it, which may be difficult in this consumerist culture. I only know that deep down, if I decide to donate my ova, it will not be an exploitation of my body, because I refuse to let it be.
Heidi Ray '02 is an opinion editor for The Amherst Student.