The AP/Boston Globe on Monday examined how increased demand for egg donations and compensation for donors in the U.S. has prompted more young women to donate their eggs. According CDC data, about 10,000 women donated eggs to federally monitored programs in 2004, compared with 3,800 women in 1996.
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine has set a $5,000 compensation guideline for egg donation with a limit of $10,000 for special circumstances, such as the recipient wanting an egg of rare ancestry, but some egg brokers pay women more, according to the AP/Globe. Some women have said they donated eggs to help friends or relatives, but others have said the compensation was a "big factor" in the decision, the AP/Globe reports. The monetary compensation has caused concern among critics that egg donation might be "driv[ing] an unregulated market for human tissue," according to the AP/Globe. Jeffrey Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics, said, "We worry that we offer people so much money that they are blind to the risk and their motivation is strictly the money." David Grainger, president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, said that women would not pass the psychological screening required of all egg donors if they were volunteering only to receive the compensation (Irvine, AP/Boston Globe, 2/19).