Shelling Out: Eugenic Afterlives in Egg Donation Advertising in Two Elite University Newspapers

Abstract

Oocyte or egg donation has been part of the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) landscape since the late 1980s. By the early 1990s, ART clinics, agencies, and family law offices began to place advertisements in college newspapers seeking egg donors to build egg banks and for particular couples. Couples themselves also began to seek out specific donors that matched criteria they were looking for. These ads grew from blanket calls for egg donors between particular ages to asking for intelligence defined by SAT scores, specific races, eye and hair colors, and more. Although scholars such as sociologist Rene Almeling and political scientist Erin Heidt-Forsythe have written about the eugenic assumptions at play in egg donations, this has mostly emerged from looking at clinics and agencies who broker eggs. Focusing instead on both clinical and individual advertising in elite university newspapers more easily reveals eugenic afterlives in how potential egg donation recipients talk about the genetic inheritability of intelligence and race. Considering that ads are placed in elite university newspapers, these egg recipients are targeting presumably intelligent students whose genetic material would contain supposedly superior DNA to pass on to potential offspring. Race is also assumed to be a stable biogenetic concept. These ads reveal how egg donation recipients are implicated within larger societal inequalities and power dynamics surrounding race, kinship, ability, and privilege.

Introduction

On December 7, 1999, an ad in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s student newspaper The Tech read, “Special egg donor needed! $25,000; We are a loving, infertile couple hoping to find a compassionate woman to help us have a baby. We’re looking for a healthy, intelligent college student or college graduate, age 21-33, with blue eyes and blonde or light brown hair. $25,000 plus expenses. Your gift of life would bring great joy” [1]. Ads like this would proliferate in elite college newspapers throughout the 1990s to mid-2010s. They were placed by egg donation agencies either building egg banks or seeking eggs for particular couples, law firms, as well as infertile couples themselves. When these ads first emerged in elite East Coast university newspapers in 1990-1993, they were much simpler, only asking for an egg donor aged 21-30 and promising compensation of around $2500.¹ Later, they began to contain more detailed preferences such as specific personal habits, height, SAT scores, ancestry, and race as well as offering up to $100,000 in compensation. This change serves to demonstrate the changing preoccupations of oocyte or egg recipients as well as those who worked on their behalf. In seeking donors with specific traits, recipients reveal their imaginings and anxieties about what good children and families should look like. Although there are a myriad of avenues from which to examine these ads including the gendered language of gift-giving, affective advertising, and class; this paper focuses on how these ads reveal preoccupation with and presuppositions about race and intelligence.² I argue that the ads illuminate egg donation recipients’ belief in the heredity of race and intelligence. These assumptions of the possibility of genetic transmission of idealized traits illustrate the afterlives of eugenics in medical landscapes.

Scholarship on the assisted reproduction environment spans multiple disciplines, including Catherine Waldby’s The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs (2019), which traces how the history of human oocytes’ perceived value intersects with the biological and social life of women [2]; Erin Heidt-Forsythe’s Between Families and Frankenstein: The Politics of Egg Donation in the United States (2018) provides a history of scientific research into human eggs [3]; Melinda E. Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008) charts the intersections of biotechnology, economics, politics, and cultural values from 1970 onwards [4]; Margaret Marsh, and Wanda Ronner’s The Pursuit of Parenthood: Reproductive Technology from Test-Tube Babies to Uterus Transplants (2019) gives a history of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and their ethical implications [5]. Lastly, Aaron Levine’s piece, “Self-regulation, Compensation, and the Ethical Recruitment of Oocyte Donors” (2010), reviews egg donation solicitation ads from college newspapers, however, he focuses mainly on compensation and only considers ads between 2005-2006, instead of taking a historical long view [6]. Although scholars have focused on eugenic legacies in egg donations, they have mainly done so for egg donation agencies. However, focusing on these elite university newspaper ads reveal these legacies from both egg agencies and individuals seeking egg donors. Here, I use eugenic legacies to discuss the constellation of ideas promulgated by the eugenics movement, such as the heredity of intelligence and race. Eugenicists were often preoccupied with reproduction as a way to create and/or preserve their narrow ideas of purity and superiority. As Quiroga and Simpson have argued, blood – good, bad, pure, etc. – has been replaced by genes, however, the historical eugenics baggage remains [7,8]. Camisha Russell in The Assisted Reproduction of Race (2018) has termed this a neoliberal eugenics era. Invoking Foucault, Russell defines this neoliberalism as one with an overriding push for freedoms, however the government does not become more tolerant but facilitates individual freedom and choice for those participating in the reproductive marketplace. Russell argues this emphasis on personal responsibility serves to “depoliticize inequalities” and therefore, race and intelligence are framed as mere choices devoid of sociopolitical and historical contexts and power dynamics [9].

The archival basis of this paper consists of over 600 ads in the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn)’s Daily Pennsylvanian (https://dparchives.library.upenn.edu/)from 1991-2002 and MIT’s The Tech (https://thetech.com/issues) from 1995-2014. These ads were coded for key words that specified what kind of donors were preferable, such as providing an acceptable age range, race and phenotypes, allusions to intelligence such as SAT scores or academic awards, affective language, health proxies, such as BMI, and compensation. These ads began and were most ubiquitous during these two and a half decades. Following the increase in reproductive agencies who maintain their own searchable databases, however, these ads have since all but disappeared from college newspapers. However, focusing on these elite university newspapers reveals how particular beliefs in the heredity of race and intelligence are at play in the oocyte donation landscape.

History of Egg Donation

Sociologist Rene Almeling provides a comprehensive history of the earliest in vitro fertilization (IVF) and egg donation cases in Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (2011). She discusses that Louise Brown was the first child conceived via IVF and was born in 1978 in Bristol, UK. In 1981, the first child conceived via IVF in the United States was born in Norfolk, Virginia. IVF dealt with some causes of infertility, but if the problem was the quality of one’s own eggs, donated eggs became a viable alternative. This substitution became a reality with children being born from donated eggs by the mid-1980s, after the first successful egg donation in 1983. To find egg donors, physicians sought out women from surrounding communities using newspaper ads and later, radio ads. They specifically excluded students in need of quick cash. These ads implored mothers under 35 with multiple children to help infertile women.

Physicians specifically looked for women who were altruistically motivated because they assumed that if a woman were solely financially motivated, she might be inclined to lie about her medical and/or family history, which relied mostly on medical honesty. Although medical honesty was also necessary from sperm donors, physicians assumed that sperm donors being financially motivated did not interfere with their medical honesty. This may have had to do with differing compensation levels as egg donors were paid around $500 in total while sperm donors were usually paid around $25-50 per session. Physicians also asserted that altruistically motivated women would be more compliant with the procedures and medications [10, p.37-8].

Since the mid-1980s, IVF procedures using egg donations have risen steadily and by 2001, egg donations amounted to 11% of all ART cycles [11]. Demand in the early 1990s grew due to older women seeking egg donors, and physicians struggled to keep up with this demand; therefore, commercial egg agencies emerged to deal with this increased need. Unlike physicians who were licensed and liable, these agencies were unregulated. There were neither licensing standards nor professional or educational requirements needed to establish and run an agency. Additionally, law firms that specialized in surrogacy and/or adoption also sought egg donors for their clients.

Similarly, the marketplace for sex cells in the US is largely unregulated, unlike those in the United Kingdom or Australia. In 1992, Congress passed the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act which requires all clinics performing assisted reproduction procedures to report data to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) [12]. By contrast, the UK’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA), founded in 1991, makes recommendations on assisted reproduction such as compensation levels for sperm and egg donors and keeping them low, as well as doing away with anonymous egg donors, requiring information to be shared with potential offspring when they turn 18 [10, p.5].

In the vacuum left by the lack of US federal oversight, two organizations emerged to provide guidelines for the industry. The American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) was founded in 1944 and is “dedicated to the advancement of the science and practice of reproductive medicine” [13]. They are affiliated with medical journals such as Fertility and Sterility and Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, where they publish guidelines for the industry. They state that their membership ranks are full of nurses, doctors, and other assisted reproductive industry professionals. The Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), born out of an ASRM special interest group, was founded in 1996. They claim that they are “the primary organization of professionals dedicated to the practice of IVF, or assisted reproductive technology (ART).” The mission of SART is to “establish and maintain standards for ART so that you receive the highest possible level of care.” They claim that 86% of clinics are SART members [14]. The SART website frequently refers to ASRM Ethics Committee publications and they also list the same contact address on their websites.

Egg Donation Advertising

Even though egg donations had been steadily rising in the early 1990s, there were no standard advertising guidelines and clinics could do whatever suited them best. Additionally, clinics were not the only ones soliciting donors; 3rd-party agencies, law firms, and individuals also advertised for egg donors and had no guidelines. Perhaps in response to this, in the October 1998 edition of Fertility and Sterility, ASRM published its second “Guidelines for oocyte donation,” with the first appearing in 1993. This two-page document had 13 sections that discussed different aspects of oocyte donation such as selection of donors and payments to donors. Notably, this edition had the first ever Solicitation of Egg Donors section, which recommended that “oocyte donation should be solicited only by means of public information or according to policy established by each clinic” [15].

University newspaper egg donation solicitation ads emerged against this backdrop of a lack of advertising standardization, as the 1998 ASRM guidelines left advertising up to clinic discretion. There were no guidelines for independent agencies, law firms, and individuals also publishing ads in college newspapers. In both the Daily Pennsylvanian and The Tech, ads were placed in the classifieds sections as well as normal ad placement. At first, these ads were published by clinics and egg agencies, probably building egg banks. They asked “healthy women” within a specific age range to donate eggs to infertile couples. The first ads in both newspapers were vague in their descriptions and simple in wording, without specific attributes such as height, hair and eye color, SAT scores, or asking for the donor to be “intelligent” or “attractive,” which later became the norm.

These clinics and agencies would also advertise in multiple college newspapers, with Figure 1 appearing many times in the Daily Pennsylvanian and other Ivy League newspapers, beginning with the January 16, 1995 issue. The ads were relatively inexpensive, the Daily Pennsylvanian classified ad rates were $0.35 per day, and decreased in price with the amount of days the ad ran. But some agencies wanted their ads to be noticed and were willing to pay for it. These agency ads often ran for at least a month, sometimes more. In fact, Pennsylvania Reproductive Associates ran one of their ads in some form (either stand alone or as a classified) upwards of 100 times between 1991 and 1996.

Figure 1.

General Ad from Egg Agency in the Daily Pennsylvanian.

Clinics, agencies, and individuals began to seek donors with specific attributes in earnest in the Daily Pennsylvanian by 1995. In the case of clinics, it is possible that they began to search for donors for specific couples, instead of to build an egg bank or database as their ads moved away from general calls for any egg donors. The first of these ads, (see Figure 2) asked for a White brunette woman who was “healthy, intelligent, very attractive.” Another ad from the March 21, 1995 issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian also asked for an intelligent White donor and asked interested parties to “Call Caroline after 7:30pm weekdays, anytime weekends” and provided a phone number [16]. This timing suggests that Caroline is seeking an egg donor for herself. She stated that she is working with a fertility specialist in Philadelphia and described her and her partner as a “childless white couple, deeply loving, ivy-educated, very good income.”

Figure 2.

Egg Agency soliciting for Clients in the Daily Pennsylvanian.

In order to entice donors with desirable attributes, most ads provided a compensation amount. In the Daily Pennsylvanian and The Tech, between 1991-2014, compensation ranged from $2000-$100,000 though the most frequent compensation fell between $2500-$5000. The most common compensation was $2500 in the 1990s, grew to $5000 by the end of the decade, and into $10,000 in the 2000s. In both the Daily Pennsylvanian and The Tech, about an average 76.7% of ads included specific dollar amounts while 23.3% simply mentioned that “generous compensation” would be provided. Between the two newspapers, 39.5% of ads also advertised that egg donor expenses and/or travel would be provided, including enticements for free medical screenings, and an April 19, 1993 ad in the Daily Pennsylvanian mentioned a free trip to California.

Attempting to curb the ever-increasing high compensation for egg donors, in 2000, ASRM expanded on their solicitation of egg donors by publishing “Financial Incentives in Recruitment of Oocyte Donors.” This document was referred to in their subsequent guidelines and was unchanged until 2016. This document focused mostly on compensation and they recommended that if an advertisement listed a financial incentive, it must also warn donors of risks [17]. However, no newspaper ad contained an adequate risk disclosure, demonstrating that these guidelines were non-binding. Two that came close simply stated, “the medical procedure is easy,” and “short medical procedure” [18]. There are possible risks such as Ovarian Hyper-Stimulation Syndrome, negative reactions to fertility drugs, and/or long-term fertility effects. There is a lack of longitudinal studies on this population, so there is no clear idea of what long-term risks are [19].

Even with ASRM providing guidelines on the larger egg donation process and SART providing guidelines on claims, clinics, then later agencies, could make, they only had jurisdiction over their members and most importantly, their guidelines were not legally binding. Additionally, since most advertising in college newspapers happened through egg agencies and individuals, they were especially unbounded. In an attempt to counter this, in 2005, SART mandated that clinics who utilize third party agencies had to require those agencies to also follow SART/ASRM guidelines. They asked them to sign an agreement attesting to this, otherwise they would be removed from SART’s referral list and lose their place on the website. In 2006, SART mandated that if any independent agencies were noncompliant, they would be removed from the list of approved donor agencies. Even though being a member of SART is voluntary, being listed as an approved clinic or agency lends a valence of extra legitimacy. They probably counted on this perception to attempt to impose standardization onto the industry. But research has shown that most clinics and agencies are noncompliant [20]. Conducting a full regular audit could take up more time than they might have to spare. The current SART executive board is 30 MDs and PhDs, who all seem to have other job commitments; they have one administrator.

Intelligence

“Genius Asian Egg Donor wanted to help us build our family, $20,000 Compensation” was in large font on a full-page ad on Friday, November 30, 2012 and again on Thursday, March 23, 2017 in The Tech (see Figure 3). The ads went on to list the contact as a person with a Caltech alumni email address, William N. of Cupertino, California. Considering that most adults typically have a Gmail or Yahoo account, its striking that he chose to insert his Caltech alumni email, potentially as a way to signal to these MIT students, that he too was part of a top tier collegiate in-group, similar to other ads that described couples as Ivy-educated. William N. posted a similar ad in the November 14, 2008 edition of The Tech, in which he again asked for a genius Asian egg donor, offered $35,000 compensation, but provided a different email address linked to a website. The only webpage on this website is his egg donation solicitation ad. Spending $35,000 on one round of egg donation along with one round of IVF, which can cost between $15,000-$30,000, would bring his total spent between $50,000-$65,000 for a child, showing William N.’s class position.

Figure 3.

Individual Egg Donation Solicitation in The Tech.

In the ad, William N. specified that he wanted someone of the “Asian race, such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.” He does state that his partner is a Chinese woman, which is probably the factor in this specification. He asked that the potential donor be between 18-35 years old, stating that his ideal donor was a “Chinese MIT student, top in her class, several awards in high school and university.” These, one can reasonably assume, are the tangible manifestations of the genius traits that he is seeking. More explicitly he said, “she wants to be an egg donor in order to help bring a child into the world with the same special gifts she has.” He assumes that the supposed genius of this person, identifiable through her accolades, are ones that she can simply pass on, without regard to the environment or other factors that shaped her as a student. As much as this is supposed to place this potential donor on a pedestal for her genius, she is ultimately reduced to intellectual prowess made possible fully through her genetic makeup and not her other characteristics. Her perseverance, drive, support systems, or any other traits and circumstances that brought her to a top tier institution such as MIT are relegated to genetic determinants. He ended with, “we hope that our child will be gifted, as each of us is,” implying that the eggs of a genius donor will undoubtedly produce a gifted child. The ability to produce such a gifted child is highly valuable, hence the $20,000, $35,000, or $50,000 price tags on his various ads.

William N. was not the only one looking for intelligent donors. In 1995 about 25% of ads sought intelligent donors, but by 2001, this criterion frequency had increased to 66.6%. Some ads simply asked for intelligence, but by the late 1990s, that intelligence came to be defined by standardized test scores, even though SAT scores had been a part of ivy league college admissions for decades. An article in the Daily Pennsylvanian on the increase of egg donation ads seeking donors with high SAT scores stated, “many ivy league students say they have certainly seen the increase of advertisements with intellectual prerequisites in their newspapers. Harvard Crimson Business Editor Chris Lange said, “we have one of these ads running almost every day this month, most specifying SAT score,” adding “16 adds [sic] will be running in the Crimson’s 20 issues this month” [21]. Egg donation solicitors assumed that high SAT scores were demonstrative of a genius genetic code, even though studies have shown that standardized testing checks student preparation and ability to take that specific test and are not objective markers of intelligence. Additionally, the recent college admissions scandal showcased that not all students at top-tier universities attend solely based on merit [22]. Intelligence cannot be genetically guaranteed. In fact, some of the factors that impact admissions – legacy, standardized tests, extra-curricular involvement – correlate more with socioeconomic status than genetics.

This trend seems especially disconcerting, because as the ASRM guidelines in 2000 stated, “such efforts to enhance offspring are morally troubling because they objectify children rather than assign them intrinsic dignity and worth” [17, p.217]. It is easier to justify that recipients want donors with specific phenotypes in order to have a child who resembles them, something adoptive parents also do [23]. But when recipients are seeking donors with specific standardized test scores, it begins to resemble positive eugenics. It leads one to wonder if these couples want a healthy child or a superior one [24]. An ad in the September 27, 1999 issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian began with, “JFK, Madonna, Pablo Picasso, Hilary Clinton, every child is different, some change the world,” lending credence to the suspicion that these recipients are seeking enhanced, potentially world-changing children. The recipients' concern about making sure they have an intelligent child highlights the ableist fear of an unintelligent or even intellectually disabled child. As Paul Lombardo explores in Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (2008), eugenicists were very preoccupied with the heredity of intelligence [25]. Selecting for intelligence is not simply for intelligence but also selecting against perceived disability and the stigma that surrounds it.

These eugenic assumptions did not emerge in a vacuum. Even though explicit eugenics had lost its luster, these ideas were still in the zeitgeist, especially when these ads were most prominent in the 1990s. The Bell Curve by Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray was originally published in 1994 [26]. The book attempts to explain the variations of intelligence in American society and argue that race plays a factor. Their argument assumes the heredity of both race and intelligence. Although this book was publicly rebuffed by scientists and others in the academy, it was a New York Times bestseller and sparked public debate [27]. Regardless of whether those placing these ads would agree or disagree with The Bell Curve, they share the assumption of a genetic basis of race and intelligence.

Race

Russell in The Assisted Reproduction of Race argues that “since its founding as a settler colonial state, the use of race as a political technology in the US has operated through the notion of kinship. These historical operations, intended primarily to establish and enforce a white supremacists racial hierarchy, have, for some time now, allowed race to serve as a proxy for kinship in a variety of contexts” [9, p.104]. She explores how polygenic ideas of racial emergence served to link the notion that because races emerged separately, everyone of a particular race would be related by blood and subsequently not related to other races [9, p.120]. Even though these concepts have lost their luster, ideas linking race and kinship remain, especially the belief that race, and the advantages certain races enjoy within an unequal society, can be reproductively transmitted.

In the Daily Pennsylvanian, 81.2% of ads that specified race stipulated that they were looking for Caucasian donors. Even when ads did not specifically ask for Caucasian donors and only asked for donors with “fair skin” or “blonde hair and blue eyes,” the reader understands that recipients are looking for phenotypes most often found in people of White European descent [28]. Some seekers specified that they were searching for a donor with particular European ancestry; one ad stated, “we prefer someone who is Greek, Hungarian, or a combination” [29]. Yet, most ads just stated Caucasian or White, signaling to the idea of a Whiteness that supersedes national or ethnic specificities. Tessa Moll also notices this trend in South African clinics, and details how a clinic director touts that the mixed European ancestry of White South Africans makes them desirable egg donors to White recipients from places such as Australia and the US. She claims that this move “attempts to enfold White South Africans into a discourse of global Whiteness” [30].

Those seeking Caucasian egg donors were not the only ones doing racializing work, with a rising tide of ads looking for Asian donors. Although the Daily Pennsylvanian does have one ad seeking an Asian egg donor, this trend is most evident in MIT’s The Tech because this movement began in earnest over the course of 2000-2014. This might be due to the fact that in the 1990s and 2000s, Asian Americans were the fastest growing high-income racial group in the US and therefore could afford these expensive services. Additionally, scholars have argued that egg agencies have a hard time finding egg donors who are women of color, especially East Asian donors [31]. This scarcity coupled with the increase in Asian women seeking egg donors might have been the source of this trend [32].

Some solicitations seeking Asian donors specified that they were searching for donors from specific countries in Asia; one ad asked for an East Indian donor, another sought someone “100% Korean” [33]. These potential parents were probably seeking a donor who reflected them. In “Why I am looking for an egg donor” in the March 22, 1999 issue of the Daily Pennsylvanian, an anonymous infertile UPenn graduate student stated, “if I look for a donor with my hair and eye color, it is simply because I want my child to feel comfortable within his family” [34]. This serves to reinforce the idea that families are cohesive phenotypical and therefore, biogenetic units. Additionally, considering most recipients sought donors from similar racial backgrounds, this fortifies the idea that families are single race groupings.

However, most of the ads seeking Asian donors did not specify ethnic or national backgrounds of egg donors. Yet, Asia contains billions of people of different ethnicities and if parents are seeking specific phenotypes, an egg donor from Sri Lanka or China will most likely produce children with different features. So why did they not specify? It is possible that these agencies or individuals were seeking people of descent from all over Asia. But also, it is important to think about silences and what is considered self-evident. In the US, when someone says Asian, most people assume as default someone of light-skinned East Asian descent. However, if an ad were placed in the UK seeking an Asian egg donor, they would attract mostly donors of South Asian descent [35]. Therefore, this lack of specification serves to reify race as a cohesive and smooth category without fissures and key differences. “Asian” as a category collapses these geographic and ethnic differences as well as place specific histories.

Ads seeking non-White and non-Asian egg donors were sparse. Beginning in 1997, OPTIONS, National Fertility Registry, an egg agency, began publishing ads seeking egg donors of all races or nationalities in the Daily Pennsylvanian. These ads ran until the end of 1998. These same ads also ran in 1998-1999 in The Tech. Presumably they were building an egg bank instead of seeking donors for particular clients. These general calls for egg donors accounted for roughly 30% of ads. Out of over 600 ads, there were two examples seeking specifically Black or Hispanic donors.³ As Lisa Ikemoto explores in “The In/Fertile, the Too Fertile, and the Dysfertile,” middle and upper-class White women are provided fertility treatments while Black women in general, and especially in the Global South, are seen as too fertile or unable to care for their children [36]. Additionally, Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body (1997) argues that Black women historically have had negative experiences with reproductive technological interference and they may be wary of using ART. Further, Roberts argues that some Black people do not define identity biologically and are therefore less preoccupied with labeling family and kinship solely through genetic terms. Whereas, “in America, White people have historically valued genetic linkages and controlled their official meaning. As the powerful class, they are the guardians of the privileges accorded to biology and they have a greater stake in maintaining the importance of genetics” [37].

Agencies and individuals say they are seeking Asian and Caucasian donors, but race cannot be passed on genetically. What recipients are searching for are specific ethnicities and phenotypic markers which can be passed on genetically. But because we tend to mark race phenotypically, this conflation of race and genetics perpetuates the false idea of a genetic basis of race. Interrogating these ads shows not only that donation recipients are making eugenic assumptions about race, but by using that language in their ads are also reproducing these eugenic ideas. Critical race scholars argue that race is both produced by and productive of sociopolitical and economic realities. It is not simply a set of beliefs, but as Russell argues, is also, “a politically powerful set of sedimented social practices” [9, p.13]. If we ask what is race doing in these ads, it reveals that donors see race as a biogenetic concept that can be passed on. It requires an ahistorical and placeless understanding of racial group formation, which then naturalizes a biogenetic concept of race. It also further accepts an understanding of family where the basis of kinship is racial sameness, especially in the presence of 50% non-parental genetic material. As Ikemoto argues, reproductive technologies could have been used to question the nuclear family and its racial and genetic links, but instead it privileges and reinforces this family model as ideal [36]. Regardless of whether there is a genetic basis for race, race is wielded by these solicitors as a constructive way to negotiate kinship, family creation, identity, and privilege.

Commodity

Although egg donation ads evoke altruism and gift giving, egg donors are selling reproductive products.⁴ Sociologist Anna Curtis argues, “altruism within egg donations is formulated in direct opposition to “selfishness,” the crass and cheapening effects of greed, economic incentives, and the marketplace” [38]. However, promises of outsized compensation seem ironic when juxtaposed with the rhetoric of altruism. In February and early March of 1999, an egg donation ad made a large splash, offering $50,000 compensation to an egg donor who fit a set of criteria. This ad made appearances in Ivy League and top-tier student newspapers all over the country and given the large compensation promised, it was reported in the wider press. The resulting New York Times article quoted a Chicago Kent Law School professor, Lori Andrews, who argued, “I think we are moving to children as consumer products. When prices for donors reach $50,000, it gets to be a meaningful life altering sum” [39]. Regardless of altruism talk, this ad demonstrates that recipients from a privileged class were willing to provide large economic incentives to entice the right donor.

Despite this trend, the ASRM Ethics Committee suggested $5000 payment in their guidelines in 1993 and later 2000 where they argue that “sums above $10,000 go beyond what is appropriate” [17, p.219]. However, ads that promised $10,000 or more flourished, up to $100,000. Whether intended or not, these high compensation pledges served to insinuate that certain attributes were more valuable, that ones’ stock could literally rise with their height or SAT scores. As Daniels and Heidt-Forsythe write in “Gendered Eugenics and the Problematic of Free Market Reproductive Technologies,” because, in this case, oocytes are commodified, “some donors are clearly able to get more lucrative financial compensation than others based on hierarchies of human value” [40, p. 735].

ASRM hoped to counteract this notion with an article in the August 2000 edition of Fertility and Sterility entitled “Financial Incentives in Recruitment of Oocyte Donors.” Their two main additions were: 1) “To avoid putting a price on human gametes or selectively valuing particular human traits, compensation should not vary according to the number or quality of oocytes retrieved or the donor’s ethnic or other personal characteristics.” And 2) “Although there is no consensus on the precise payment that oocyte donors should receive, at this time sums of $5,000 or more require justification and sums above $10,000 go beyond what is appropriate. Programs recruiting oocyte donors and those assisting couples who have recruited their own donors should establish a level of compensation that minimizes the possibility of undue inducement of donors and the suggestion that payment is for the oocytes themselves” [17, p.219].

With the increasing costs of college, this fear of undue inducement seemed to become a reality when a full-page ad in the November 13, 2007 edition of The Tech offering $35,000 compensation ended with, “Ease your tuition debt and help complete a family” [41]. This ad explicitly recognized that egg donation was a financial transaction and that college students were facing increased tuition and debt. Between 1999 and 2007, both MIT and UPenn undergraduate and graduate tuitions grew about $10,000. This was an extra $40,000 over 4 years, along with increases in room and board. Additionally, students began increasingly pursuing graduate degrees, which do not tend to offer financial aid.

Given these changed financial realities of potential egg donors, if they donated the recommended maximum of 6 times at $35,000 each, one could argue that $210,000 operates as an undue financial incentive. In “Gendered Eugenics and the Problematic of Free Market Reproductive Technologies,” Daniels and Heidt-Forsythe argue that high payments “potentially compromise the free agency of donors” because donors might disregard potential risks [40, p.737]. In this article, they go on to recommend that donors are paid only for travel and expenses such as lost wages. Modeling after the UK’s HFEA, which regulates the fertility market, they endorse informed consent for a variety of gamete usage, risk disclosures, restrictions on data given about donors including religion, GPA, and nationality. Although acknowledging the fears of the past racist, classist, and ableist nature of state reproductive regulation, they argue that adopting these policies would enable “increase access to technologies and open doors to alternative family formation while empowering those most vulnerable to exploitation in these processes” [40, p.744].

On the contrary, one could argue that these potential donors should be able to make individual bodily choices, including ones that allow for increased financial freedom. In this case, state regulation which limits compensation curtails their agency. This issue came to the fore, in 2011, in California, two former egg donors filed a suit against ASRM, SART, and egg agencies who abide by their compensation guidelines. They alleged that these compensation guidelines amounted to illegal price fixing. The case was settled in 2016, with ASRM changing their guidelines to no longer include specific compensation amounts [42].

These ads allow us to see how reproductive value is commodified along lines of racial and intellectual ability. With this ruling, donors with particular traits – Whiteness, high intelligence defined by Ivy League attendance, high GPA and SAT scores – will continue to be the most sought after. This reveals a hierarchy wherein those with supposedly desirable traits will be able to sell their reproductive materials for more and more, only limited by how much recipients are willing to pay.

Conclusion

In The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs, Waldby writes, “hence, the biotechnical capacity to transfer tissues immediately raises questions of just distribution. Who should give tissues, under what circumstances, and to whom? Oocytes are particularly mobile, dense points at which such power relationships play out” [2, p.5]. Exploring egg donation ads in the Daily Pennsylvanian and The Tech, we observe that they went from blanket calls seeking donors between the ages of 21-32 to increasingly detailed lists of criteria including particular phenotypes, race, and intelligence. These ads seeking mostly high achieving White women, later Asian women, went from offering $2000 (sometimes also covering travel and expenses) to up to $100,000. This supposedly private matter of family-making implicate the recipients in larger social inequalities and power dynamics. Promises of high compensation reveals a hierarchy of desirable traits that egg recipients believe will be passed on genetically. Their assumptions reveal the ongoing eugenic legacy that sees race as a stable and biogenetic concept as well as links genes with intellect despite there being no genetic markers of intelligence.

Egg donation recipients also reveal their anxieties surrounding birthing the right kinds of children. Charis Thompson deploys the term “causal antagonism” which describes that recipients and agencies assume that donor traits will emerge in the child and because of this uncertainty, operate with a level of causality [43]. Even though the genetic bases of race and intelligence are contested, Thompson argues that recipients cling to these markers to wrest back control over an unpredictable situation. However, as Russell argues, this neoliberal eugenics era depoliticizes these anxieties by presenting them as mere choices free of discussions of racial inequality, ability, and privilege.

To counteract this, Daniels and Heidt-Forsythe’s “Gendered Eugenics and the Problematic of Free Market Reproductive Technologies” article advocates that egg agency websites, where searches for suitable egg donors have migrated, limit donor descriptions including race and GPAs.⁵ Their other suggestions are wide ranging and can be pushed further. These egg donors are providing reproductive materials to be used to create future children. However, most of the policies are about protecting them in the present instead of also thinking about their futures. Daniels and Heidt-Forsythe advocate for agencies to make clear the risks to egg donors and this is a first step. To further support egg donors, clinics and agencies could initiate and privately fund a study which, modeled after the Spanish SIRHA, Assisted Human Reproduction Information System, would track egg donors to assess the long term health risks of egg donations [44]. Finally, this information gathering would allow for more comprehensive risk disclosures as we gain more long-term data about egg donors. The egg donation industry will probably continue to grow. Balancing egg donors’ agency and bodily autonomy while considering and planning for their future health can be one of the many steps forward.

Glossary

ART

Assisted Reproductive Technology

IVF

in vitro fertilization

ASRM

American Society of Reproductive Medicine

SART

The Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology

HFEA

Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority

Author Contributions

This article was written solely by Cheryl Hagan.

Funding Statement

None.