May 28, 2009

The egg donation business has set up shop on college campuses, preying on young women in need of cash. Ironically, graduation provides a rare marketing opportunity for the American fertility industry to make one last appeal to these female students. After racking up debt to get that diploma, they now are faced with a job market on hard economic times.  How will they make it on their own?

The egg donation ads in their college newspaper not only promise quick cash, they make bold and enticing claims to 'help' a desperate couple, to 'be an angel' and 'make dreams come true'. Websites promise to make the process of egg donation simply rewarding". Michael Collins, a Daily Princetonian columnist, writes:

Ads promising more than $35,000 in compensation for egg donations show up in The Daily Princetonian every couple of days. Having seen the massive advertised payouts and the personal ads, I wondered: Did early feminists fight to keep the government out of their ovaries just so the free market could invade?

It doesn't take but a moment on Google to find out that greed has invaded the ovaries of the American college student.  These ads ran last week on college campuses across the country:

Yale University not only runs ads in their campus paper, they also operate the Yale Fertility Center which has a full page of information on becoming an egg donor.  But not one mention about the health risks to the young egg donor.  How convenient to run your fertility center with a new population of potential egg donors arriving on campus every fall!

Because of the work I do in raising awareness of the dangers of egg donation, I am privileged to have many young women share their tragic stories with me.  Where do I begin with my disdain for egg donation practices which has little to do with 'donation' but much to do with exploitation.

Woman X, a Ph.D. student, who sold her eggs to pay for school, writes this about her experience as an egg donor:

Eight days after the retrieval, I woke with a searing pain in my lower abdomen. It felt my insides were being tied tightly with a string. I tried to get out of bed and fainted from the pain. A friend drove me to the clinic. It was a Saturday so I saw the on-call doctor. She performed an ultrasound and said it was nothing more than my follicles shedding and that the pain would go away in a few days. She told me if anything serious were wrong, I would know. I wouldn't have been able to walk into the clinic. I felt like the doctor thought I was being overly dramatic, making a big deal of a little cramping. Over the next three days my abdomen swelled, I was delirious with pain and fever, and couldn't move my bowels. Another friend drove me back to the clinic, and the nurse told me I needed an enema and to eat something and I would be fine. However, whenever I ate I would vomit. On the fifth day I couldn't stop vomiting. I spent an entire night vomiting stool.

Woman X ended up back in surgery to remove a torsioned ovary.  Five years later she was diagnosed with stage II B breast cancer.  Chemo and radiation destroyed her remaining ovary.  She's left unable to have children and fears her long-term prospects as a breast cancer survivor.

Jane Doe, a desirable Asian egg donor, had 50-60 eggs taken during one egg donation cycle.  She too ended up back in surgery a few hours later when it was finally discovered that the fertility doctor had punctured an artery somewhere near here ovary.  Jane describes a common reality of 'blame the egg donor' when things go wrong.  She writes:

Afterwards, the doctor kept reiterating that it was my fault and that this has never happened to her, in the hundreds and hundreds of times she's done this.

Jane also suffered ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), which carries many symptoms ranging from fluid retention, abdominal bloating, organ failure, stroke and even death.  All signs indicate she has lost her own fertility as well.  She states:

I have been using ovulation tests to see if I am still fertile, but so far no luck.  My ovaries are abnormal in appearance with multiple cysts, whereas before they were pretty unremarkable.

Risk of certain types of cancer in women who take the powerful hormones in order to hyperstimulate the ovary to produce surplus eggs is well documented in the medical literature.  Ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome can have devastating effects on a woman.  Bleeding, infection, stroke, organ failure and loss of future fertility are very real risks, which a non-patient, otherwise healthy young girl should never be exposed to. It is one thing to be a sick patient, who assumes the risks of certain medical therapies, in order to gain a benefit.  It is entirely a different matter to intentionally medicate and perform surgery on someone who has nothing to gain but a bit of money!

The fertility industry and fertility specialists have little vested interest in protecting young women egg donors.  The best the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) can offer are "guidelines" stating women should not donate their eggs more than six times.  This guideline is an absolutely meaningless number, which is not based on any scientific, empirical data and begs the question why six and not five or seven?  By their own data, in their reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they break their own rules and ignore their own guidelines.  In the wake of the birth of the Octuplets one story broke stating that only 20% of fertility clinics play by the rules.

The IVF industry, fertility specialists and fertility clinics—along with the brokers of eggs and sperm—have strong conflicts of interest.  The IVF industry is a $3 billion dollar a year enterprise in America. A New York Times article from February 23, 2009, noted that fertility doctors at private universities are among the highest paid.  Dr. James A. Grifo, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at New York University, was paid $2,393,646, substantially more than the president of the university.  I was on a Fox morning program with the head of NYU's egg donor program who proudly boasted that NYU only paid its students $8000.00 for donating their eggs.  Fertility doctors are money-makers for universities.

Now I have learned that Facebook is allowing egg donor ads, targeting young women, to sell their eggs.  One student at the University of California at Irvine wrote to me on Facebook last week saying she'd received an ad offering $100,000 for her eggs if she was selected. The medical profession has a fiduciary responsibility to protect the health and well-being of these young women.  Parents have the right to send their daughters off to college and not to worry that their future health and well-being will be robbed from them.  To that end, a campaign has just been launched to demand Facebook stop running egg donor ads.  Young women should be able to trust the medical establishment and not to be viewed as a resource for precious materials.

Graduation should be a celebratory time to look forward to a bright future of endless opportunities, not a time to face shattered dreams.

Responses to Are Creationists Wrong?

Let's get this straight: Science is the attempt by an intelligent life form (us...I'm trying to be flattering) to try to build a "working" model of the universe. It isn't perfect, but in terms of building our understanding, it's the best tool we've got. No "theory" is perfect; the universe is infinite, and our brains aren't. But I get really tired of this so-called "conflict" between science and religion. Religion is, at it's essence, an attempt by us to understand God and our relationship with Him (I'm using the singular, but have no intention of offending any pantheists among us). As Saint Paul wrote, "The Universe is but a thought of God". There can be no conflict between true science, and true religion. Where there is conflict, it is man-made, because the Universe is what it is, not what we want it to be. A religion that denied, say, the law of gravity, would be a false religion, because gravity is, and no amount of temporizing by humans will change the fact. On the other hand, a science that categorically denies the existence, or at least, the possibility of the existence, of a Supreme Being (or Beings...how would I know?), is as much a form a religious fanaticism as is atheism (Who know, without any doubt, that there is NO God. Again, how would they know?). I am an engineer, and to a degree, a scientist. I'm also a Buddhist. But like any scientist worth his or her salt, I'm always open to new ideas. I want to know what makes the Universe tick, not force other people to agree with whatever ideas I might hold at the moment. When I was a child, back in the 1950's, the "scientific" theory of the creation of the Earth had a wandering star passing close to our Sun and pulling off a lot of material that became our Solar System. That made planets, and Earth, pretty close to unique. It may have made some fundamentalists feel "special" but it seemed to me to be a waste of a perfectly good Universe. Now, we have proof that a very large percentage of stars have their own planetary system. Seems they're as common as rocks. Whether humans like it or not, God made a lot of planets. Odds are He created a lot of life out there too. We just haven't run into it yet. But like I said, any other reality would also seem like a real waste of a Universe. I remember the title of a book my mother had, by the Unitarian A. Powell Davies; "Your God Is Too Small". Amen to that. Sincerely, - Harry A. Madden Rancho Cordova, CA

http://www.icr.org/article/natural-selection-creationists-idea/
Natural Selection - A Creationist's Idea by Paul G. Humber, M.S. According to Loren C. Eiseley, Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and the History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania before his death, "the leading tenets of Darwin's work — the struggle for existence, variation, natural selection, and sexual selection — are all fully expressed" in a paper written by creationist Edward Blyth in 18351 (emphasis added). Unlike Darwin, however, Blyth saw natural selection as a preserving factor rather than as "a potentially liberalizing" one. According to this under-appreciated naturalist, the conserving principle was "intended by Providence to keep up the typical qualities of a species." Atypical variations, to use Eiseley's words, led to the animal's "discovery and destruction."2 [snip]
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May 20/09 [snip] tothesource: What does this all have to do with Darwin's account of evolution through natural selection? Wiker: Everything! Darwin crafted his account of natural selection specifically to eliminate any need for God as an explanation for the variety of species, and their extraordinary design. Natural selection is indeed a powerful and important concept, and other scientists had already set out aspects of natural selection decades before Darwin published his Origin of Species. But Darwin insisted on making it an all-encompassing explanation of everything in biology, an explanation that entirely eliminated God. - DB

Please tell Mr Wicker that after reading his book "10 books that screwed up the world" I realized that he forgot the bible. That would have been the #1 book that screwed and continues to screw the world. It could have been an oversight from his part. - JCM