Considering how long the cost of living has been a crisis, it’s taken a while to affect the price of one sought-after commodity: home-produced human eggs. Having been set at £750 for 13 years, the compensation limit for women who contribute their eggs is finally to rise, in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, to £986.
Not that this sum should be seen as a payment, fee or gratuity. Reporting on the increase, the BBC went out of its way to remind women that financial compensation is an incentive to niceness, nothing else: “Egg donors warned not to do it for the £986 cash”.
Maybe that’s why the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) didn’t round the money up to £990: the four quid bung might have attracted a more calculating sort of woman, one liable to wonder, shortly before her arduously cultivated eggs are harvested under anaesthetic, why the total compensation for this gruelling but inessential service wouldn’t pay for a decent iPhone.
The revised but relatively modest sum acts as a test of women’s altruism, and their collective altruism as a guarantor of the fertility industry’s purity. While more squeamish countries have, as with commercial surrogacy, prohibited egg donation, and others, like the US, encouraged a fertility free-for-all, the UK has arrived at a compromise: if young women can be persuaded to supply eggs or to gestate foetuses for expenses or less, the whole sector is excused its commodifying. No women were coerced, from financial want, into the reproductive market. On the other hand, it could be argued, nor were they decently paid.
For the benefit of a commercial clinic that might advertise IVF (from an “Altruistic Egg Donor”) for at least £12,000, a British donor submits, for her £986 compensation, to the screening and invasive procedures that might earn a US student $10,000. Though it’s admittedly more generous than Scotland’s recently advertised offer of, basically, state approval for women who “give the joy of starting a family”. Across the UK, egg donors appear to be (though we do not forget the achievements of sperm donors) the only people in this flourishing sector expected never to taint the miracle of IVF with an itemised invoice.
Much credit for this system should go to the HFEA, from whose procurement-friendly website (in which egg donation is described as an “amazing selfless act”) potential donors might never guess that the long-term risks to health are still considered, by a significant body of academics, inadequately researched. Nor that, for many familiar with the screening, tests, daily injections, scans, bloating and discomfort of ovarian stimulation and egg collection, this is not something they would dream of asking a young woman – maybe as young as 18 – to do for unknown beneficiaries.
Similarly, neither the BBC nor the Scottish parliament’s joyous account of egg donation is balanced by accounts from women who have reported being hospitalised, or traumatised, or regretful after supplying human tissue.
Discussing the increased compensation on Mumsnet, an egg donor who “was really ill due to excess bleeding” wrote last week: “It’s absolutely not something I would do again and I would never have done it in the first place if I hadn’t been asked by someone incredibly important to me.”
Severe ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) is a rare but not unknown side-effect; around a third of women have suffered, as the HFEA says, mild OHSS, “which can normally be effectively treated at home with pain relief”. A statement that might be more reassuring if clinicians were not in the habit, as increasingly turns out to be the case, of trivialising women’s pain.
The sadness when, as sometimes happens, a woman who has donated eggs is later unable to conceive, may be still less well controlled, but does not feature on the HFEA’s website.
To add to these unknowns, UK egg donors must agree that any resulting children (from a maximum of 10 families) should be able, when they turn 18, to seek contact. Though the HFEA is correct, in the light of all this, to call egg donation an amazing selfless act, maybe it should be asking why a booming industry worth over £470m should formally depend, no less than some austere religious enterprise, on limitless female selflessness and self-flagellation. About one in six IVF procedures now usedonor gametes.
If it is unfair to wonder if there is a man in existence who would so painfully commit his body to an unknown person’s reproductive interests, it is hard to think of another part of the UK economy that depends to this critical extent on women being kind. Or, given current expectations, even kinder than usual.
The analogy with freely donated blood and organs, although it has usefully underlined the generosity of egg donors, is inexact: the egg receivers’ lives are not at risk; donor eggs are produced to order; egg donors are invited to accept risks from which for-profit recruiters stand to benefit. “Donating,” a leading clinic tells interested women, is “the most priceless gift you can give”. For parents, its eight-fresh-eggs package costs £13,245.
Even when women are actively paid for supplying eggs, the lack of long-term research has cast doubt on the possibility of informed consent. Of course, in an industry that requires impoverished women to gestate, deliver and promptly relinquish babies commissioned by some of the most entitled parents on Earth, you expect a level of indifference towards those demarcated, more briefly, as egg production facilities.
But research suggests that not only are some women encouraged by the procurers of their eggs to forget potential long-term complications, there is minimal industry interest in establishing what, if any, these are. It is not often that one turns, for guidance, to the British Hen Welfare Trust but in its charitable concern for egg producers’ interests it could surely enlighten the HFEA.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
