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of seeking help from the universities themselves. The medical school at the very prestigious Yale University, for one, runs an egg donation programme under the legalistic label ‘third party reproduction’. Yale is, after all, a member of the Ivy League, and according to a 2009 report in Marie Claire, payment for the eggs of blonde, blue-eyed, athletic undergraduates have sold for as much as $100,000. That’s an attractive sum for a student who is likely to be staring down a massive debt bill for her higher education. At Yale, tuition fees alone now stand at $40,500 per year – which adds up to roughly $160,000 over the course of a standard four-year undergraduate degree.

In the US, donor eggs generally come from American women, but in Spain and Cyprus eggs may come from women who live anywhere in Europe, so that women from places that are experiencing tough economic times may travel quite a distance to make some much-needed cash. One Eastern European woman, who decided against donating her own eggs but witnessed many others do so, told the Observer: ‘They work the cabarets, they’ll sleep with men, they’ll sell their eggs, and then they go back again.’ She seemed to equate each of these activities – reflecting on the various ways in which women, desperate for money, may try to earn a living. And since women are highly unlikely to be sleeping with men and selling their eggs simultaneously, you almost have to assume that egg donation might be an escape from the other. In Russia, the £800 often paid by a Spanish clinic for one cycle of egg donations equals a year of average wages. The Observer noted that one clinic even offered a $500 ‘signing’ payment to women willing to be flown from the Ukraine to Cyprus for egg-donor screening.

Because this is a ‘free’ market, clinics offer all sorts of bonuses. If a woman is willing to donate more eggs, she can earn an extra fee – but producing more eggs means taking more hormones, twice the dose that is recommended. This can be very bad for the health. Premature menopause, uterine cancer, and ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome can result. The therapy has also put several women at risk of death. In one case, a Stanford student who had agreed to donate eggs for a fee of $15,000 experienced a rare adverse reaction to one of the fertility drugs she was given. The side effects were devastating. She suffered a massive stroke, which left her in a coma for eight weeks with long-term brain damage.

The money paid to the sellers of eggs is probably dwarfed by the revenues that stream into the ‘middle-man’ clinics. Because these private clinics are able to pay top price for eggs, they have little to no donor shortage and are also able to perform what some have called ‘personalized baby marketing’: if the client pays a fee over and above what the clinic has paid to the donor, then the client may select a donor based on her height, weight, eye colour, educational attainment, and other criteria.

In an effort to curtail the influence of money in egg and sperm donations, in April 2005 the European Parliament adopted a resolution banning trade in human cells and embryos. The legislators were moved to act after reports emerged that a clinic in Romania was sending ‘mail-order eggs’ to the UK, with the UK government proposing to pay up to £1000 as an incentive to entice more donors in the future. While compensation for donor expenses is allowed under the European resolution, the regulatory body responsible for administering the rule stated that a payment in the range of £1000 would be well above the allowed limit.

Despite the new law, the market continued to prosper. In Romania, five people were arrested and held in detention in the summer of 2009 over suspicion of trafficking human eggs. The chief prosecutor of Romania’s organized crime department also held the suspects on broader charges, including allegedly practising medicine without a permit and being involved in a criminal group. Before their detention, two of the group, gynaecologists from Israel, had run an IVF and plastic surgery clinic in Bucharest. The gynaecologists were suspected of recruiting women aged between eighteen and thirty and paying them around £150 ($300) for their eggs. The eggs were then sold on for £5000 to £7000 ($10,000 to $14,000) to clients from Israel, Italy, and the UK. According to the Romanian newspaper Gardianul, the clinic’s annual earnings were around €20 million (£14 million, or $25 million). The case closely followed the arrest, on similar charges, of thirty Israelis who worked in a separate fertility clinic in Romania, which suggested that the scheme was not an isolated case of a few bad apples taking advantage of an otherwise finely controlled system.

Then, in 2010, a fertility clinic in Cyprus came under surveillance after authorities received claims of human egg trafficking. The clinic, run by mostly Russian staff, relied primarily on donors from Eastern Europe. Three Ukrainian women in their thirties, all of whom were living and working legally in Cyprus, were questioned after donating eggs to the clinic, and said that they had received more than reimbursement for their expenses. According to media reports, the women claimed to have been paid €1500 (about £1000, or $1900) for their services, though the police would not confirm the figure. Officially, the clinic was shut down in May 2010 on orders of the health ministry for failing to provide full data for the provenance of embryos, eggs, and sperm. This effectively meant that the donors were untraceable. Indeed, Cyprus had become a favoured destination for the egg trade because of its clinics’ low prices and donor anonymity. The police investigation into illegal egg trafficking had to wait for the Ukrainian government’s approval.

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