Price and Prejudice: How Ads for Egg Donation are Starting to Sound like Matrimonials
By Ipsita Chakravarty,
Scroll.in
| 08. 02. 2015
[India]
The advertisement was seeking a woman with a “high intelligence quotient, fair or wheatish complexion, between 22-26 yrs. Preferably B +ve”.
It might have added convent-educated, very good-natured and specified a caste. But this was no matrimonial notice. Placed by an organisation called Surrogacy India, it was looking for egg donors who would meet that description. It went on said egg donors would be “duly rewarded”.
The prejudices that prevail in practices such as marriage seem to have been transferred to the process of birth itself, with people openly asking for traits that they think will produce the kind of babies they want. It's a kind of a Shaadi.com for embryos.
Except that it’s more complicated than that. The practice of egg donation, especially when done commercially, has thrown up a range of tricky ethical questions over the years. India, which has seen an assisted reproduction boom in recent years, was blissfully oblivious to these questions. These procedures were lucrative businesses with no regulations or standards. But with drafting of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill, 2013, the conversation...
Related Articles
Reproductive rights have been a flashpoint in national politics for decades, with the stakes surging after the Supreme Court shredded the right to an abortion. In the current presidential campaign, the battle over abortion has swelled and morphed to encompass in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has now moved rapidly from widely accepted to partisan hot button.
This dramatic shift was highlighted by the February decision of the Alabama Supreme Court that granted personhood rights to frozen IVF embryos, signaling that...
By Deirdre Walsh , NPR | 09.17.2024
Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic bill to provide a nationwide right to IVF treatments. It was the second time Senate Democrats tried and failed to advance the measure.
Reproductive freedom has remained a central issue in several Senate contests that...
By Matthew Rozsa, Salon | 09.15.2024
When a person with a uterus decides to freeze their eggs, any number of things can go wrong. Ice crystal can form, killing an otherwise viable ovum. A fertilized egg may fail to properly implant, or the egg may...
By Sarah Kliff, The New York Times | 09.09.2024
Image by Stephen Andrews from Unsplash
Yale agreed on Monday to pay dozens of patients who had filed lawsuits claiming that they had endured excruciatingly painful egg retrieval procedures after a nurse at its fertility clinic secretly swapped their anesthesia...