Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

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:

Egg donor wanted – $35,000 compensation. We are a couple seeking a high-IQ egg donor to help build our family. You should have or be working on a university degree from a world-class university; you should have [high] standardized test scores and preferably some outstanding achievements and awards.

When an ad isn’t lure enough, there’s always the alternative