T A B L E++T A L K

When's the right time to discuss religion with your child? Preach it, in the Mothers area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Second Thoughts
By Sallie Tisdale
High school doesn't need to be fixed; it needs to be reinvented
(03/04/98)

Sexual harassment law: Relax and try to enjoy it
By Laura Green
Despite its occasional excesses, sexual harassment law has improved the workplace
(03/03/98)

The silence is deafening
By By Jonathan Broder
Anne Northup asks why her Democratic sisters are letting President Clinton off the hook
(03/03/98)

Giving experts the Big Slammu
By Beth Levine
No rest for the expert weary
(03/02/98)

Slaves in the family
By Maryanne Vollers
A white man's odyssey into his clan's secret history is a searing look at the most shameful event in America's past
(02/27/98)

ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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Win
Sign up for our newsletter and win a free copy of "Birthday Letters," by Ted Hughes.

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_____the price of eggs in america

BY CYNTHIA JOYCE | When Jennifer Nardini was in her final semester at the University of Washington in the spring of 1996, she was, like many college seniors, idealistic, adventurous -- and broke. So when she heard about women who were making easy money by donating their eggs to the University of Washington Fertility and Endocrine Center, she was intrigued. Though she hadn't yet given much thought to having children herself, she'd always assumed she'd have them some day. But in the meantime, if she wasn't ready yet, why not help someone who was?

"You get 1,700 bucks, some shots, and then they take the stuff out," she remembers thinking. "People strip for money, I figured, why not donate your eggs? It didn't seem like such a big deal."

Having watched her own roommate go through the two-month cycle of birth control pills and hormone injections without suffering any side effects, Jennifer eagerly signed on with the clinic's growing stable of donors. She filled out a 15-page questionnaire about her medical history, answered myriad questions about her current hobbies and interests, and signed the legal consent forms; when the clinic called weeks later to tell her that a couple had chosen her as their preferred donor, she was thrilled. "I didn't really know how I felt about the possibility that 18 years from now someone could contact me and say, 'You're my mother,'" she admits. "But I thought the happiness I'd get from helping out a couple would balance out any weirdness."

But the actual process of donating eggs proved to be a much bigger deal than Jennifer bargained for. For the first month after the clinic called, Jennifer took hormones in order to synchronize her menstrual cycle with the recipient's. (Although recent breakthroughs may soon make it possible to fertilize frozen eggs in vitro, currently donor eggs must be fertilized fresh and then immediately implanted into the recipient's uterus.) Every day for the following month, she went to the clinic for hormone injections that stimulated the development of more eggs. Instead of experiencing PMS symptoms, as she was warned she might, the injections made her feel sick.

When the time finally came to "harvest" her eggs, Jennifer was in considerable pain. The doctor, using a tiny needle to puncture her ovaries and suction out the eggs, discovered that her ovaries had been hyperstimulated, a potentially fatal condition that occurs in about 4 to 5 percent of women taking fertility drugs (much milder forms of hyperstimulation occurs in about 20 percent of cases); normally walnut-sized, they had swollen to the size of grapefruits and had developed more than 50 eggs -- almost twice as many as during a typical harvest. Immediately after the extraction, her ovaries leaked excess fluids into her abdominal cavity, causing her to gain about 30 pounds. "It looked like I was pregnant," she says with disgust. "They took 44 eggs from me, and there were still some left." She was hospitalized for five days, and it took another two months before her body returned to normal. Later, she was told that the procedure had been a success; the recipient was pregnant with an embryo formed from one of her eggs.

Although the clinic did pay for Jennifer's hospital bills, they offered her no further compensation for her trouble -- or for the extra eggs they harvested. "They were legally entitled to use the other eggs," she acknowledges. "But I just felt it was rude to take advantage of that -- they never talked to me about that possibility until after I got really sick."

What Jennifer refers to as merely "rude" is what a growing number of medical professionals and bioethicists call outright exploitation -- placing one group of women at risk for the benefit of another. Fertility clinics, they charge, are part of a market-driven, underresearched, dangerously unregulated industry that is growing too quickly and that may pose long-term medical and psychological risks to its participants. Some argue that only women who don't want any more children of their own should be allowed to donate their eggs and that there should be standard age limits for both donors and participants. Others, citing long-standing strictures against people selling parts of their body, object to the fact that people are paid -- and paid increasingly well -- for their eggs. And there are still broader philosophical and ethical questions: By encouraging women to sell their eggs, are we mechanizing motherhood, turning life itself into a commodity?

N E X T+P A G E: Seeding the earth

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ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHON ROSEN