Like a Virgin (33 page)

How does this affect the welfare of the children? So far, research has focused on the effects of growing up fatherless, and most of it involves households where a
single-parent family has been created by force, not by choice. Yes, there are negative consequences for a child’s cognitive, social, and emotional development when economic hardship, parental
conflict, or parental death is part of the family story. But these effects should not be generalized to include children born into solo-mother families. From the early accounts, children of solo
parents experience neither trauma (from the break-up of the family) nor financial hardship. For many, in fact, the situation is quite the opposite.

Although there have been few studies of solo parents, a remarkably consistent theme emerges in the interviews that have been conducted: the women (and solo parents are almost always women, given
the limits of today’s technology) realized that they had no other viable options for becoming a mother. Time was running out, and they had no long-term partner in their sights. The risk of
having a child through a casual sexual liaison was too great, be it the chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease or of being deceived about the other person’s intentions towards
any child that might result. A few said that they simply wanted to have a child without the involvement of a man.

Of course, this all assumes that a woman is seeking to become a mother biologically. As it happens, most of the solo mothers studied mentioned that adoption was their first choice – they
described it as a ‘more moral’ solution to the desire to start a family. But adoption wasn’t a viable option either. In the US and the UK, most adoption agencies prefer to place
very young children with couples in their twenties or early thirties; older, single women reported that their only real option was to turn to international adoption bureaus, which charge at least
£20,000, or $32,000, for their services. In contrast, buying an egg or sperm costs ten times less. Given that raising a child involves a considerable amount of expense,
spread over twenty or more years, this financial decision could be interpreted as a first signal of parental responsibility.

In at least one recorded case, the decision to become a solo parent was tightly bound with the woman’s religious beliefs. The woman, part of a small group study of solo mothers, said that
having a baby using medical interventions was her only moral choice since she wasn’t married, and her religion considered sex outside marriage to be a sin. She effectively took the scientific
route to a church-sanctioned virgin birth.

While buying eggs from a younger woman is a highly effective way for an older woman to have a child, having to use donated eggs is not ideal – especially for the donor.
Donating eggs is an invasive, inconvenient, and, at times, painful process, requiring daily hormone injections and the extraction of eggs from the ovary. Truly altruistic donations of eggs are few
and far between. As in the case of wombs-for-rent, there is scope for abuse. Women from poor socio-economic backgrounds may submit to – or be coerced into – successive egg donations to
make money, or even to gain access to fertility treatments for themselves. This phenomenon has been called ‘fertility tourism’ or, in its more nefarious forms, ‘egg
trafficking’.

Since the first successful birth from a donated egg in 1984 at the UCLA Medical Center, the trade in eggs has grown exponentially – and offers a classic study in free-market supply and
demand. Originally, egg donation was developed as a therapy for young women with premature ovarian failure; only more
recently has it become more widely used as a means of
overcoming the age-related decline in fertility. In the early days, egg donation as a charitable act was the norm, but as the demand for eggs has increased – because of both technological and
social change – the motivations for supplying eggs have shifted. In the UK, the egg-donor market shows just how few egg donations are motivated purely by altruism, since very little money is
paid to a donor for her eggs, and very few eggs are donated. Donors are not paid for their services beyond their ‘expenses’. For some, this is enough money to make the effort
worthwhile, but the donation rates in the UK are lower than in places where women are paid more. Further, egg and sperm donors are no longer permitted to be anonymous in the UK, which discourages
some who do not want to be faced with a genetic child eighteen years down the road. In France, the most restrictive of European countries when it comes to egg donation, the eggs must be deemed to
be a completely free gift from one woman to another. In one recent year, just 144 French women volunteered to undergo the donation procedure. There is no financial compensation in Britain either,
but in the same year, 1509 women donated eggs in the UK (although 999 of them were sharing eggs while undergoing fertility treatments themselves).

In other countries, where it is legal to pay vast sums of money to egg donors, the fertility clinics are in demand. Spain, for example, boasts more private IVF clinics than any other country in
the world – and the country’s clinics also claim to get the best results. Good enough that French women flock there to receive donor eggs, since so few are available at home. If you
undergo IVF in Spain and use ‘donated’ eggs instead of your own, you will probably pay an extra £2000 for your treatment, which gives some sense of what these eggs cost to
‘buy’. There’s a very good reason for the wonderful success rates: the Spanish clinics advertise to young women, at the peak of their
fertility, and offer
lucrative compensation – around four times the UK rate, from £800 to over £1000. Spanish law allows payment for the donor’s time (as compared to her eggs), which skirts EU
regulations to avoid exploitation of reproductive material. This is the case in Cyprus, one of the other hotspots for continental egg donation procedures. And in some US states, it is quite legal
to pay young women huge sums of money for their eggs. Young women are often recruited through private clinics or online agencies; a Google search will bring up tens of thousands of results. But
especially desirable donors – usually university-educated women, offering the ‘right’ geneticmake-up – are also targeted through ads posted at university campuses and in
student newspapers. One fairly typical notice reads:

When an ad isn’t lure enough, there’s always the alternative of seeking help from the universities themselves. The medical school at the very prestigious Yale University, for one,
runs an egg donation programme under the legalistic label ‘third party reproduction’. Yale is, after all, a member of the Ivy League, and according to a 2009 report in
Marie
Claire
, payment for the eggs of blonde, blue-eyed, athletic undergraduates have sold for as much as $100,000. That’s an attractive sum for a student who is likely to be staring down a
massive debt bill for her higher education. At Yale, tuition fees alone now stand at $40,500 per year – which adds up to roughly $160,000 over the course of a
standard
four-year undergraduate degree.

In the US, donor eggs generally come from American women, but in Spain and Cyprus eggs may come from women who live anywhere in Europe, so that women from places that are experiencing tough
economic times may travel quite a distance to make some much-needed cash. One Eastern European woman, who decided against donating her own eggs but witnessed many others do so, told the
Observer
: ‘They work the cabarets, they’ll sleep with men, they’ll sell their eggs, and then they go back again.’ She seemed to equate each of these activities
– reflecting on the various ways in which women, desperate for money, may try to earn a living. And since women are highly unlikely to be sleeping with men and selling their eggs
simultaneously, you almost have to assume that egg donation might be an escape from the other. In Russia, the £800 often paid by a Spanish clinic for one cycle of egg donations equals a year
of average wages. The
Observer
noted that one clinic even offered a $500 ‘signing’ payment to women willing to be flown from the Ukraine to Cyprus for egg-donor screening.

Because this is a ‘free’ market, clinics offer all sorts of bonuses. If a woman is willing to donate more eggs, she can earn an extra fee – but producing more eggs means taking
more hormones, twice the dose that is recommended. This can be very bad for the health. Premature menopause, uterine cancer, and ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome can result. The therapy has also
put several women at risk of death. In one case, a Stanford student who had agreed to donate eggs for a fee of $15,000 experienced a rare adverse reaction to one of the fertility drugs she was
given. The side effects were devastating. She suffered a massive stroke, which left her in a coma for eight weeks with long-term brain damage.

The money paid to the sellers of eggs is probably dwarfed by the revenues that stream into the ‘middle-man’ clinics. Because these private clinics are able to pay
top price for eggs, they have little to no donor shortage and are also able to perform what some have called ‘personalized baby marketing’: if the client pays a fee over and above what
the clinic has paid to the donor, then the client may select a donor based on her height, weight, eye colour, educational attainment, and other criteria.

In an effort to curtail the influence of money in egg and sperm donations, in April 2005 the European Parliament adopted a resolution banning trade in human cells and embryos. The legislators
were moved to act after reports emerged that a clinic in Romania was sending ‘mail-order eggs’ to the UK, with the UK government proposing to pay up to £1000 as an incentive to
entice more donors in the future. While compensation for donor expenses is allowed under the European resolution, the regulatory body responsible for administering the rule stated that a payment in
the range of £1000 would be well above the allowed limit.

Despite the new law, the market continued to prosper. In Romania, five people were arrested and held in detention in the summer of 2009 over suspicion of trafficking human eggs. The chief
prosecutor of Romania’s organized crime department also held the suspects on broader charges, including allegedly practising medicine without a permit and being involved in a criminal group.
Before their detention, two of the group, gynaecologists from Israel, had run an IVF and plastic surgery clinic in Bucharest. The gynaecologists were suspected of recruiting women aged between
eighteen and thirty and paying them around £150 ($300) for their eggs. The eggs were
then sold on for £5000 to £7000 ($10,000 to $14,000) to clients from
Israel, Italy, and the UK. According to the Romanian newspaper
Gardianul
, the clinic’s annual earnings were around €20 million (£14 million, or $25 million). The case
closely followed the arrest, on similar charges, of thirty Israelis who worked in a separate fertility clinic in Romania, which suggested that the scheme was not an isolated case of a few bad
apples taking advantage of an otherwise finely controlled system.

Then, in 2010, a fertility clinic in Cyprus came under surveillance after authorities received claims of human egg trafficking. The clinic, run by mostly Russian staff, relied primarily on
donors from Eastern Europe. Three Ukrainian women in their thirties, all of whom were living and working legally in Cyprus, were questioned after donating eggs to the clinic, and said that they had
received more than reimbursement for their expenses. According to media reports, the women claimed to have been paid €1500 (about £1000, or $1900) for their services, though the police
would not confirm the figure. Officially, the clinic was shut down in May 2010 on orders of the health ministry for failing to provide full data for the provenance of embryos, eggs, and sperm. This
effectively meant that the donors were untraceable. Indeed, Cyprus had become a favoured destination for the egg trade because of its clinics’ low prices and donor anonymity. The police
investigation into illegal egg trafficking had to wait for the Ukrainian government’s approval.