Why waste your life working for a few shillings a week in a scullery, eighteen hours a day, when a woman could earn a decent wage by selling her body instead? – Emma Goldman
When I first wrote the column entitled “Welcome To Our World” back in January, I had no idea I would find so many examples of spurious, paternalistic arguments against people doing as they like with their own bodies; since then, however, I find them all the time. The latest is this October 11th article from Reason which addresses claims that paying women for their eggs is somehow “exploitation”:
…Researchers announced that they had created stem cell lines using human eggs for the first time. The goal of this research, funded by the private non-profit New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF), is to create stem cells that could be transformed into tissues and organs for use in transplants and other procedures where a perfect genetic match greatly increases the chances of success. In this case, the researchers added the nuclei taken from donors’ adult skin cells to unfertilized human eggs. The stem cells they produced this way contain three sets of chromosomes rather than the standard two…while these triploid cells are therapeutically useless, the researchers believe that studying them will lead to breakthroughs that will enable them to produce transplantable cells some day.
Heretofore, researchers have been able to produce cloned stem cells for lots of different animals but not for humans. One reason for this difference is that animal eggs for use in stem cell research are much more plentiful than human eggs. Why is there a shortage of human eggs for research? In part, because bioethicists endorse…guidelines that forbid paying women more than their expenses for donating eggs for research. (In contrast, women are free to sell their eggs for thousands of dollars for use in assisted reproduction.) Fortunately for the NYSCF researchers, New York changed its regulations in 2009, allowing researchers…to obtain 270 eggs from 16 women [by paying them] $8,000 each…a Columbia University fertility clinic…paid the women…in advance and…only asked [them] after harvesting to choose between directing them to either reproductive or research purposes.
Nevertheless, many bioethicists agree with the NAS prohibition and still oppose paying women for their eggs…Marcy Darnovsky…of the Center for Genetics and Society…[said] “We should not put the health of young women at risk, especially to get raw materials for such exploratory investigations”…[and] University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Jonathan Moreno worries that the new stem cell research gets into “paying-for-organs controversy”…Judy Norsigian [of women’s health group, Our Bodies, Ourselves] agreed, “I do have some very serious concerns about such wholesale solicitation of young women for their eggs at such very attractive prices.” The main risk that women run is…[that] the ovaries become swollen and fluid can leak into the [abdomen]…one woman actually produced 26 eggs. [But] a [current] review of the medical literature…finds that the risk…is very low…[and] when proper precautions are taken into account the risk…is “diminished even further to almost zero.”
Stony Brook University bioethicist Brooke Ellison and preventive medicine professor Jaymie Meliker note that many opponents of egg buying argue that poor women would disproportionately subject themselves to this risk. After reviewing the…data, they conclude the risk…“does not appear to be so great as to warrant policies preventing women from donating eggs.” They also point out lots of activities that society encourages people to undertake including participation in clinical trials and some forms of manual labor are far more risky than egg harvesting. Note also that another recent study estimated that the risk of death from ovarian hyperstimulation is between 1 in 45,000 and 1 in 500,000, comparable to your lifetime risk of dying of a lightning strike (1 in 80,000). These mortality estimates are based on an earlier version of the treatment. Newer protocols cut the risk even more.
So if risks of selling eggs for research are not all that great, why is there so much opposition to it? Ellison and Brooke mention in passing the possibility of “the existence of paternalism in denying women the right to donate their eggs if they so choose”…“The only difference between providing oocytes (eggs) for reproduction and providing oocytes for research is that only the former can be compensated,” observe [bioethicists Kathryin Hinsch and Robin Fiore]. They add, “Since fears of commoditization and exploitation apply equally to both, the ban on compensation for research oocytes can only be explained by the politics of stem cell research.” There is a whiff of paternalism wafting off the statements of Darnovsky, Moreno, and Norsigian against allowing women to sell their eggs for research. If the risks of producing eggs for research are, as recent data suggest, minimal, then surely Hinsch and Fiore are right when they assert: “It is actually prohibiting payment that is exploitative of women: not paying them fairly for their time, inconvenience and risk, and their contribution to financially rewarding science.”
Regular readers will recognize the insultingly patronizing notion that poor women are too stupid to make reasoned decisions of risk vs. gain, the crypto-moralistic insistence that anything involving sex is different from anything not involving sex (nobody seems to have any ethical problems with paying for donated blood), and the neofeminist dogma that paying a woman for any service which only women can perform constitutes “exploitation”. But Hinsch and Fiore are correct, and their final statement is as applicable to prostitution as it is to egg donation; it is indeed the prohibition of payment to women for their time, inconvenience and risk which is inherently exploitative.
One Year Ago Today
“October Miscellanea” reports on several topics appropriate for the season: a death, an exhumation, 1950s horror comics and vampire whores.
In addition to your cogent observations, I see in this part of the long-running effort on the part of the Medical Profession to present themselves as Scientists, where most of them are – frankly – engineers at best, and too many of them are mechanics. Not paying women for their eggs preserves the aura of “pure research” in an enterprise that, from my reading, would otherwise soon take on the glamor one normally associates with replacing transmissions.
As a scientist, I object to characterizing us as better than engineers.
I think this is an example where you have to “cut through the fog” …
The “fog” is … these paternalistic attitudes toward women selling their eggs for a profit, and the potential of exploitation. However, this is just the “fog” – it’s not the real issue because there seems to be NO issue here with eggs sold for reproductive purposes.
The real issue is the STEM CELL issue.
As you know, I’m Pro-Life but – I read this story and found that these cells can only “divide” to produce about 70-100 cells. That’s enough to produce a line of stem cells, but it’s hardly what I would call “life” or even, “potential life”. But, in a nutshell – there you have it. The anti-stem cell crowd gives a wink and the paternalistic concerns that women may be “exploited” and that they’re too dumb to make their own decisions gets thrown about. Never mind the fact that it’s not an issue for reproductive eggs.
They need to find a way to use male sperm cells. We men can whip out a few trillion of those in a few hours and the extraction procedure is much less complicated! 😉
Nothing worth doing is easy though, I guess!
I was helping my 12 year old daughter with homework last night and she needed to find a current “scientific event”. I found a pretty lame one for her involving geology – THIS would have been much better! Of course, she goes to Catholic school so I wonder exactly how this would have gone over in class!
Actually, I’m going to drill a bit deeper into this stem cell thing – it may change some of my attitudes on embryonic stem cells. It appears that I learn very slowly. I previously had no clue that these particular stem cells could only develop for 70-100 divisions. Of course – some of the cynics also claimed in the article that these stem cells are of limited use – because they contain three chromosomes and aren’t a perfect reproduction of the adult stem cell donor.
Ahh – and whilst writing this – my OUTLOOK Email just gave me a prompt that I must complete “Trafficking in Persons” training again before the end of the week! LOL
Yeeha! I’m ON it! 🙁
Stem cell research is rapidly becoming a swamp, if it hasn’t already got there. The Pro Stem Cell arguments are frequently being put forward by ardent pro-choice activists, and seem to often be larded with half-truths that aid the Pro Choice debate. The very same can be said, swapping pro-choice for pro-life, of the other side. It rapidly becomes very hard to put much faith in either side of the argument.
I wish I could sell mine; it’s not like I’m using them!
I really wish I had know about egg donation when I was in my twenties; I would have done that as many times as they had allowed. I think they only accept young (under 30) donors, though. 🙁
Yeah, the ads seem to want people younger than 30 (though I’ve seen 35 as the cut-off for some) and also someone who has previously been pregnant. What is the point in that? I don’t want to get pregnant, so please – take my eggs!
In a nutshell, older parents=increased risk of birth defects/developmental disorders. I’ll be good and cite sources too:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3702393
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100208102411.htm
As an aside, this is one of those things that farmers/animal breeders have “known” about for ages that actually turned out to be correct, sort of like their functional understanding of the results of incest (look up line breeding some day), not to mention the generally negative results of recessive genes (not that they knew them as genes, but still managed to link certain phenotypes that are the result of expressed recessive genes with being undesirable and generally culled them, or possibly completely ended lines where it popped up from time to time)…sorry, just one of the subjects that have always fascinated me.
Kinda makes one wonder about the future of humanity with people choosing to put off parenthood because of careers, uncertain economies, wanting to play more in youth, and the like…
Kinda makes one wonder about the future of humanity with people choosing to put off parenthood because of careers, uncertain economies, wanting to play more in youth, and the like…
Well, earlier this month it was reported that a Turkish woman had become the first to successfully receive a womb transplant… and then there is ongoing work into cloning human eggs. Completely artificial reproduction may eventually be possible.
Same here. Early on, I decided no kids, and had a tuba-ligation. I wasn’t using those eggs, so at $1800 an egg, I could have made a pile of money! I don’t think they were doing that back when I was in my twenties though.
I think they pay a flat rate of about $8000-$10,000 for the collection process regardless of how many eggs they get; as the story above says, one woman produced 26 eggs but still got the same as the others. But still! $8000 a pop is more than I ever made whoring!
Though I am sympathetic to any argument that people ought to have the right to do what they wish with their body, I think an abundance of caution is warranted when dealing with the possible sale of body parts.
In this particular case, Tonja’s comment about the part in question being of little utility to the woman is relevant. However, it is not hard to envision future medical technology that might (hypothetically, for example) enable transfer of limbs from person to person. Would it be ethical to allow a poor person to sell an arm? I don’t know if I am a pure enough libertarian to be comfortable with the concept of limb sales – though the argument of an inviolable personal right to determine the fate of one’s own body would suggest that such a transaction is not unethical.
Another reason is to eliminate the potential market for forcibly-harvested body parts. While it might be defensible for one person to sell a kidney, it is obviously monstrous for someone’s kidney to be stolen. Forbidding the sale of organs under any circumstances is a draconian response to such a possibility, but the crime is so monstrous that I think it may well be justifiable.
It is the potential for cases like these, and the historically spotty record of human experimentation (think Tuskegee syphilis or Nazi medical research), that are the reason for the extreme caution with which research is conducted on human subjects. Though the situation for egg donors/sellers may be different in some significant ways, I think it’s important that we take an extreme position with regard to human experimentation to avoid taking any steps even toward a slippery slope.
Regards,
SC
Well then, as drunk people occasionally kill others we aught to ban all alcohol.
Don’t give anyone any ideas. They are already trying to bring that back.
While the concerns are understandable, I don’t think they’re justified in this case, for a few reasons:
1. First and foremost, no surgeon who values their ethics, their license, or (most importantly) their malpractice insurance is going to accept sold organs without a clean history (both legally and medically), and would probably not accept organs that aren’t currently in their donor (for things like lungs, kidneys, etc.) since the best organ carrier is the person they belong to. (And any surgeon who isn’t constrained by such concerns probably doesn’t feel particularly constrained by the current laws.)
2. By opening the market and bringing more supply, you decrease the market price and thus decrease the incentive for someone to obtain organs illegally (less payoff). (The same principle works with Alcohol Prohibition, the Drug War, etc.)
Skeptical cynic wrote: “I think an abundance of caution is warranted when dealing with the possible sale of body parts.”
Eggs aren’t organs. Organs are part of the physical structure of the body; organs are stuck. Eggs get expelled every month through menstruation. Eggs serve no purpose for the woman’s survival and she can sell them without any significant risk of damage to her health. So it’s not comparable to selling a kidney.
All true. I could be persuaded that a very carefully guarded exception might be made for eggs. But I would remain concerned about the potential for a slippery slope.
a) It’s now going to take me all day to get “zydrate comes in a little glass vial” out of my head. Thanks. 😛
b) Women are already able to sell their eggs, all nice and legal, as long as it’s for reproduction and not research. So if there is a slippery slope here, we’re already on it, and not just in New York.
c) These technological ethics questions get very complicated, in part because technology advances so quickly. For instance: what if a lost arm can be regrown, but it takes a year? And what if that is much cheaper than transplanting an arm from a donor, but the transplant can be over and done with in three weeks? Then what are the ethics of a poor person selling an arm that he’ll have back in a year so that some richer person can have his arm replaced immediately? Being paid for blood would be considered very unethical if the blood was never replaced, but since it is…
OK, I know this is off topic, but it had to do (sort of) with hookers and it made me laugh so I wanted to share it. 🙂
http://www.newzimbabwe.com/news-6349-Hooker+turns+into+donkey,+court+hears/news.aspx
Another of my readers sent me that early this morning, and it is pretty damned funny. But as I told him, it’s not unusual for Africans to defend themselves from charges by claiming that people turn into animals; I was reminded of this story from a couple of years ago.
That one is pretty good too. I posted it back on the thread where I got the first one. Thanks. 🙂
Pleased to be of service. 😉
I hate it when people pick on animals like that. It really gets my goat.
In Russia, Goat Gets You!
In Nigeria, Goat ROBS You!
😉
Ok, now I’m confused. Are you a time traveller? Just how exactly can you post a reply at 11:37AM to a comment posted at 12:22AM on the same day?
I guess the system Maggie is using uses the time on your local computer instead of a fixed local time where her blog is and time zones are not taken into account?
Oh… It was supposed to be “in SOVIET Russia”. 🙂
Oh never mind, I figured it out finally. Sorry, I had too many beers today. I still stand by the SOVIET part. 🙂
So long as the woman is told what the risks are and the side effects of the medications for harvesting her eggs, she should be able to make her own decision as to whether she wants to proceed. I think that it is presumptuous to say because a woman is poor that somehow she is incapable of making a good decision in regard to this matter. However I do see where if you are poor your more willing to take risks for the money. Again, who are we to tell a woman she can’t do this if she has been given all the facts. Do we tell nurses they can’t nurse because the risks are too great? Or women who want to become police officers for money that the risks are too great to their health? Anyway, here are some facts on how egg harvesting are done:
“The process of egg extraction is time consuming, and it is not comfortable. For some women, it can be painful. A woman first has to take medications to stop her menstrual cycle and then daily hormone injections for several weeks to stimulate her ovaries to produce a crop of mature eggs at once.
The drugs may cause bloating, weight gain, moodiness and irritability, and there is a risk of a rare condition called ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome that can cause life-threatening complications, blood clots and kidney failure…
And since egg donors go through much the same process as women trying to conceive in vitro, there are concerns that they may be prone to the higher rates of certain cancers that some studies have found among infertility patients. Still, said Dr. James A. Grifo, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology at the New York University School of Medicine, “There is no credible evidence of long-lasting effects or health consequences down the line.”