A reader responds in great detail:
I think there is no question that egg donors should be paid. It shouldn't be thought of as purchasing the woman's eggs but rather paying for her services. When men donate sperm, they go into a room with some dirty magazines and do something they do all the time for pleasure. Women who donate eggs, on the other hand, have to donate several weeks of their lives, endure daily injections, multiple blood tests and a surgical procedure.
Basically, the donor has to go through an IVF procedure. In any reputable program, before women are accepted as donors, they are thoroughly screened, not only physically, but psychologically, to make sure that this is the right thing for them to do. Potential donors who are doing it primarlily for the money, or who are not really comfortable with what they are doing are generally screened out.
Once a woman is accepted, the donor and recipient have to coordinate their menstrual cycles, so the donor generally has to go on birth control pills for some period of time. Depending on the protocol used, she then may have to have daily injections of a drug that puts her body into basically a menopausal state, with attendant side effects like hot flashes and headaches. Then she has to have daily injections of drugs to stimulate her ovaries to produce multiple eggs.
If she develops a lot of eggs, as one hopes with an egg donor, she may feel uncomfortable, crampy and bloated. During this stimulation phase, which can be about another 8-10 days, she also has to have frequent blood tests and ultrasounds. When the eggs are ready to be retrieved, she has to have another injection, and a surgical procedure to retrieve the eggs, and will have to miss a day at work. She will have to take antibiotics after the retrieval, and have follow-up doctor appointments. She is also asked to refrain from intercourse during at least the last part of the cycle.
(Here's a link to a guide for donors from the fertility clinic at St. Barnabas in New Jersey, considered one of the best in the country. Donors get paid $8,000 at St. Barnabas. Private agencies pay much more.)
This is no minor commitment. I think women who donate eggs mostly do it for altruistic reasons. I get choked up just thinking about what an incredibly generous thing it is to do, to give someone the means to create a family. It takes a special person to do something like that. While it is generous, and the women who do it generally have their hearts entirely in the right place, I think very few women would do it if they were not somehow compensated.
I do think there is a danger, however, that if potential donors are offered too much money, greed will be become the primary motivator. Some women will then overlook the potential risks and ignore their feelings about the myriad implications of donating genetic material to a total stranger. Having women do it for the money, who regret it later in life, would taint what should be a beautiful thing.
The Dish 