Library aid, research assistant, tutoring, working in the fitness center, dorm monitor–all of these are typical jobs for college students to offset the the high cost of study. But there’s a new trend now for cash starved coeds: simply donate your eggs.
College is really expensive and student loans can take ages to pay back, but egg donation can get you money, and quickly. With male college students, a similar phenomenon has existed with sperm donation for years. An estimated 50 – 90 percent of sperm donors are college students. It’s not as lucrative as egg donation–just 40-100 dollars per semen sample–but, if the man’s sample is selected and used for a pregnancy, he can end up making one thousand dollars or more.
But for women the stakes are higher, because eggs are harder to generate than sperm. And not all eggs are created equal. College age women studying at an Ivy League campus, or at a similarly competitive school, can expect a pretty price for their eggs. Women and couples in their late thirties and beyond looking for donors want youthful eggs, because the chances of a successful pregnancy are higher, but they also prefer ‘brainy genes’. College women can earn upwards of $2,000 for their eggs. And, if your SAT scores are high, chances are you could be looking at a price tag closer to $10,000. According to the Yale Daily News, one student with 1500 on her SATs who is also a non-smoker fetched $25,000.
Pluses and minuses
Being an egg donor might sound like a more appealing way to earn money than cleaning glassware in a lab, or serving eggs with ham at the local breakfast joint. But egg donation requires you to give something of great value: your body. To produce the golden eggs, a woman must be treated with hormone therapy to stimulate ovarian follicles. This is achieved using the same class of fertility drugs given to older women seeking to become pregnant with their own eggs after attempting pregnancy on their own without success.
These drugs are not without side effects; mimicking what it’s like being pregnant, they can make you severely nauseous and in rare cases can lead to complications. These include ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome in which ovaries become large and heavy, and adnexal torsion. In this latter case, the ovary twists around itself due to the increased weight from the hyperstimulated follicles.
Also, typically, the drugs must be injected, sometimes frequently or overnight so that you may need to do it yourself. And, it could be months of therapy before you have produced the stash of eggs that will give you the maximum pay. Along the way, there are constant ultrasound scans to see how your eggs are developing, and finally there is egg retrieval surgery. All this so that a stranger will give birth to a child that has your genes and whom you’ll likely never meet.
That can be a drawback, as explained by Jasmine Stein, a graduate of Purdue University who donated her eggs for $8,000 in 2012 and wrote about the experience for the Huffington Post:
In the weeks leading up to the procedure, my mind began filling up with reasons why I didn’t want to do it: “This is surgery, I could die” and, “There’s going to be a kid out there that looks like me…weird!” But in the end the $8,000 outweighed all my fears.
For Stein, the monetary benefit won out. And the same is true for many college students and recent graduates. In comparison, the job description for a college male donating sperm is less demanding: show up at the clinic, go into a special room that’s stocked with pornography and supply the sample into a sterile cup. For that, the student gets paid $40 -$100. Only if the sperm is used for an attempted fertilization and pregnancy does he get a bigger sum, and only about 5 percent of donors get to that point.
For both males and females, before you’re selected as a candidate, you must go through a process of medical and genetic testing; at minimum, candidates must be tested to rule out serious hereditary diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell trait, and various other conditions.
Then, there is the issue of how the “job” might look to your peers. “There’s still some stigma around it,” said Stein. Nevertheless, she is confident that “[Egg donation] is becoming more and more of an option” for college women.
Texas State University graduate Chelsea McDonald agreed. “A lot of people think it’s really weird, but I want people to know it’s not.”
Eggsploitation?
Not everybody is happy with the new business. Focusing on women who have had negative experiences in donating their eggs for pay, the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network produced a documentary called Eggsploitation: The Fertility Industry has a Dirty Little Secret. It’s premise: using money as the bait, the industry ‘pressures’ college women to give away one of their most valuable assets: their genes. And the women put their health at risk to do so.
Critics also focus on what they say is the distasteful glorification of eugenics–the rewarding of people with “good genes”. The system selects out genes of women not only with high IQs, but also with the most desirable height, body shape and overall physical attractiveness. They suggest that this is encouraging a kind of corporate-driven age of eugenics.
Are things really going in that direction? At this point, no. But what happens if this becomes more common, and egg donation evolves into a college work-study program?
David Warmflash is an astrobiologist, physician and science writer. Follow @CosmicEvolution to read what he is saying on Twitter.
