A raffle for free (human) eggs | The Health Culture

At a London seminar promoting American donor eggs for infertile British women, a Virginia infertility clinic offered attendees the chance to win an American woman’s eggs. Also included was a free in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle (a $23,000 value). The reaction, on both sides of the Atlantic, was mixed.

According to The Washington Post, there has been “intense criticism from infertility experts, bioethicists and others in Britain and the United States, who likened the event to a crass, commercial come-on similar to a lottery, with the prize being a human body part.”

“We strongly have the view that using a raffle to determine who will receive treatment with donor eggs is inappropriate,” said a spokesman for the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, which regulates infertility care in Britain. “It trivializes altruistic donation, whether of eggs, sperm or embryos.”

A spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, on the other hand, said it “applauded” a contest that allows patients to build their families.

Who sells eggs? The poor. Who buys them? The rich.

Others brought up the slippery slope argument:

[T]he practice is the latest manifestation of a dangerous dearth of regulation of infertility clinics and runs counter to common safeguards against treating body parts like commodities.
“If you commodify body parts, including reproductive materials, who’s going to be selling them? It’s going to be the poor. And who’s going to be buying them? It’s going to be rich people,” said Jonathan D. Moreno, a University of Pennsylvania bioethicist.
“You’re gradually going down a slippery slope that not only undermines respect for certain body parts but eventually whole bodies of, say, people who are very old or very sick or very poor,” Moreno said. “It’s true they are not selling them. But they have a commercial interest. They are essentially offering eggs as a raffle item.”

Officials at the Fairfax, VA clinic attributed the controversy to cultural differences, citing similar seminars in the US that have never provoked a reaction. “I guess it must be a cultural thing,” said Harvey J. Stern, director of reproductive genetics at the Fairfax clinic.

Uh … I don’t think so. I think that guy from Pennsylvania has a good point. Unfortunately, it’s something we don’t like to talk about.

Sources:

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Rob Stein, London seminar offering free IVF from Virginia clinic sparks controversy, The Washington Post, March 18, 2010