I was surprised at the very clinical approach to the egg donation issue over at The Frisky last week.
Breaking down the medical steps a woman has to go through if she opts to donate her eggs to another family for procreation, it was a well-informed article. It just seemed to skip right over stage one.
I may be stereotyping here (OK, yes, I am stereotyping here), but when it comes to donating eggs vs. donating sperm, the donor seems more likely to have a mental and emotional hurdle to leap before they get to the point where they show up at a clinic and start filling out paperwork and rolling up their sleeves for shots.
Egg donation is a wonderful thing for the recipients who gain a chance to have the baby they would otherwise be unable to make (whether it be infertile females, gay men, what have you). It can also be quite lucrative for the women who do so. Women report anywhere from $5 to at least $20,000 for the process (which, if you read The Frisky article, is in-depth . . . much more so than that of the sperm donor).
Many women can separate the egg being removed from their body from the idea that somewhere out there, a child will exist. To them, it is not their child. It's the child of the person who received their egg. End of story. Still, many can't - and those are the women who would not make a good potential donor.
Maybe it's because I could hardly see myself being a donor (a personal choice, not a judgment call) that I think that part stands above the medical concerns when you're debating "is egg donation worth the money?" The exact question asked in the article is, "Is the money worth the headache and time it takes to be accepted as a donor?" I have no qualms about letting a woman do it just for the money (plenty of men do it, why can't we?), but again, the headache and time it takes to be accepted seem to be secondary hurdles.
Because until you can decide that you have no emotional connection to that egg, you shouldn't even think of facing all of those medical issues.
Do you think this is an issue best approached clinically or emotionally?
Image: FirstScience
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