Alison Motluck worries that fertility doctors may be downplaying the medical risks for donors. She highlights a major fault with their business model: doctors’ conflict of interest, since they have “two patients—the recipient and the donor” whose interests often collide:
In other areas of medicine that use donors, such as bone-marrow transplantation, physicians have taken steps to protect donors by separating their medical care from the care of the recipient. Applied to fertility medicine, this could mean giving the egg donor her own doctor, responsible only to her and keeping only her health in mind. A separate doctor could care for the recipient. Given that the recipient is the paying patient, however, this would be a challenging ideal to uphold in practice.
Egg donors deserve at least the same treatment as other patients—and, arguably, better. After all, they are young and healthy, and they undertake medical treatment for another person’s benefit. They deserve to know the truth about the health risks they face, and, wherever possible, to have those risks reduced.
The Dish 