Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm by Rene Almeling Read Free Book Online

[egg] donors. Yes, we pay them $2,000, and that’s probably the low end of what donors are getting paid around the nation, but in [this small college town], it’s not an insignificant amount of money. When we ask them, “Why do you want to be a donor?” most say, “Well, I saw this [news] program on TV, or I’ve got a cousin that’s going through infertility, or I want to help people.” Most of them, it’s about some reason other than I saw an ad in the newspaper, and I want to make some money, because it’s a hard way of making money.
    Rene: What is it about altruism that’s important?
    Physician: It just tells me that they’re less likely to have regrets down the road, that they’ve really approached this as “I want to help somebody,” not “I’m doing this to make money.”
    Rene: And then a similar question for sperm donors. What would make you think this is a great donor?
    Physician: The sperm donors were different. They weren’t paid very much per specimen. I think it was 50 bucks. Sperm donors, in general, weren’t as altruistic. They honestly were guys that wanted to make money, and guys have less attachment of their sperm than women do of their eggs. Very few sperm donors actually ever have regrets about, you know, “What did I do?” So, men were a little different than the women.
    In summarizing attitudes toward the men and women who provide sex cells for infertility patients, a lab technician who had worked at University Fertility Services since the late 1980s said, “I think a lot of people felt that sperm donors were a dime a dozen and your egg donors are gold.”
    CONCLUSION
    Casual observers of the medical market for sex cells point to biological differences between women and men and consider them explanation enough for the greater economic and cultural valuation of egg donors. Indeed, individual women have fewer eggs than individual men have sperm, and egg retrieval requires surgery, while sperm retrieval requires masturbation. However, shifting the lens from individual bodies to the broader market reveals an oversupply of women willing to be egg donors. Both the yearlong commitment and stringent requirements make men difficult to recruit, yet hundreds of women’s profiles languish on agency websites, far outstripping recipient demand. Despite this abundance, egg donor fees hold steady and are often calibrated by staff perceptions of a woman’s characteristics and a recipient’s wealth. Moreover, these high levels of compensation coexist seamlessly with altruistic rhetoric, because agency staff members draw on cultural norms of maternal femininity to frame egg donation as a gift exchange.
    It is not that altruistic rhetoric is completely absent in sperm banks or that men cannot make a couple of thousand dollars a year providing weekly samples, but the dynamic interplay between biological, economic, cultural, and structural factors differentiates the market for eggs from that for sperm in each stage of the donation process. In recruiting marketable donors, both egg agencies and sperm banks place advertisements listing biological requirements (e.g., age), but egg agencies emphasize the opportunity to help and sperm banks portray donation as a job, a distinction shaped by gendered stereotypes that appear in countless organizational processes. The greater cultural acceptance of egg donation probably results in more women applicants than men, and staffers screen women based on biological factors such as medical history. Butalso under review are a woman’s physical appearance and stated motivations. Men’s health history is similarly scrutinized, and those willing to release identifying information to offspring are preferred, but responsibility, height, and sperm count ultimately define the ideal sperm donor.
    Once accepted into a donation program, a woman’s profile will be used to match her with a specific recipient client, as eggs cannot yet be frozen like sperm. 21 Men must build