Last week I participated in a panel discussion with three women who had, like me, exchanged some ova for cash. It was in a bar basement; everyone was drinking; and my co-panelists–Valerie Bronte, Diana Fleischman, and Marie Huber–happened to be insanely funny, smart people who changed my mind about a few aspects of the process.
I spent my allotted time explaining that my emotional response does not seem to conform to the acceptable cultural script. Reporters call and ask “how painful was it?” and “Do you regret it now?” It wasn’t painful, I reply, I’m quite happy to have had the experience. Awkward silence. They ask whether I know someone else they can talk to. I’m never quoted. In conversation I generally feel pushed to say that I feel somehow traumatized, and I have at times felt ashamed for not feeling more seriously affected by the transaction. I’ve since come to recognize this as a kind of emotional bullying, a push to elicit expected emotional responses.
Melissa Lafsky of the Huffington Post was sitting directly in front of me, listening but perhaps not quite understanding. On cue, she has written a long post criticizing three of us for not engaging the experience with the appropriate frequency of conflicted emotional fraught-ness. All those egg jokes we were cracking? Woe are we three sad, ova-selling clowns:
When it came to the messy internal aspects — whether or not it felt exploitative to sell a piece of their genetic material, whether or not it was humiliating, frightening, or painful to manipulate their bodies with constant drugs and surgeries, whether or not it bothered them to produce genetic offspring that they’d never know or raise — there was nary a word. Instead, glib comments ruled the day whenever a gray area came up. One woman, when asked how she felt about a child (or two, or three) made from her eggs existing unknown to her, joked that she liked the idea of climbing a mountain in 18 years and “summoning my dark army.”
We’ve reached a funny point in the whole feminism game. The new card to play is honesty, where taboos and dirty little secrets about sex, fertility, selling eggs, rape, abortion, etc. are no longer whispered behind closed doors…
I like the idea of “playing the honesty card.” You didn’t lie about being gang-raped? Stop playing the honesty card!
But somehow, all the cultural openness has taken an ironic twist. In this age of “oversharing,”… it’s still somehow unacceptable to acknowledge the feelings and emotions that inevitably accompany these things. As with the “Thinking and Drinking” debacle, women are displaying an unrealistic and dangerous rush to stamp out all those pesky emotions, toss a few gallons of denial on top, and cover the whole thing up with a joke. We bring “issues” like rape and abortion to the forefront in a show of power, but then shield ourselves in deadpan nihilism to avoid looking weak, even when we’re writing or speaking about how we were date raped, or sexually abused, or had our eggs sucked out through a needle.
It’s true that there’s no one way to react to these traumas — yes, having your eggs harvested counts as trauma, all rapier wit aside — and you can’t slap a label on them classifying the damage. Having your body invaded, your sense of control and power eliminated, is traumatic regardless of gender…. there’s a huge distinction between laughing at your abortion and laughing off your abortion, and the discrepancy can be the difference between regaining power versus a life sentence of buried self-negation.
There is nothing I can say here that won’t contribute to my life sentence of buried self-negation, but it’s worth noting that Lafsky is bounding the range of acceptable emotional responses available to half the population. (Of course you were traumatized! Don’t you know how emotional women are?) I’ve no doubt that some women, perhaps many women, are distraught after their egg retrievals. But why on earth would we all have the same reaction? Why not allow women–most human beings–to individuate emotionally? And why does Lafsky want it to have been so troubling for each and every one of us?
…It sure would have been comforting if at least one of these brilliant, self-possessed women had admitted, “Yeah, I’ve been conflicted. I’ve had strong feelings, and sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing. But I chose it, and that was my choice, so if I burst into tears at the memory of the pain, or the thought that my child could be walking around the world never knowing me, well, I deal with it. And I find a way to laugh.”
This isn’t an accurate description of the panel, perhaps because the author stomped out in disgust partway through. Each of us did in fact give reasons why we felt conflicted about the experience; Bronte said that at times it felt cheapening, Huber that it was very physically painful. (See how it was painful for some of us and not for others? Almost like we’re different people?) Fleischman said we would much prefer if women choose adoption, a point I mentioned in my reason piece, which Lafsky links to and draws a few facts from in order to establish her expertise in the whole ugly business.
It’s worth pointing out that anyone who repeatedly lumps together rape, abortion, and IVF either thinks very little of the line between coercion and autonomy, or thinks very little, full stop. I would never dream of writing a Lafskian blog post telling women who have been raped how they all ought to feel about it. But I do understand that it will always be more subversive, more difficult, to admit a lack of emotion in these circumstances rather than an excess. To say: I had an abortion, and felt nothing; I sold my eggs, and enjoyed it; I was a sex worker, and loved it. Break taboos, and the world wants contrition. Oh, you don’t feel any? Cry anyway.
But there I go playing the honesty card again! I’ll try to stick to script from now on, and I look forward to future posts on how I feel about my childhood, ex-boyfriends, career prospects, etc.
Great response to an infuriatingly offensive post. It’s almost impossible to say this to anyone, but seriously, I had an abortion, and felt nothing—it is in my top three least regretted major decisions of all time. I can hardly imagine why someone who freely decided to have her eggs harvested would have serious issues with the idea of her biological children not knowing her.
You should tell people that you’re proud to be one of the few women who can say what guys say: “I have no children, at least none that I know about, hee hee.”
Next thing you are going to tell us you’ve had sex to a person you were not married to and enjoyed it and didn’t feel guilty.
But you can’t have enjoyed it!
And if you did enjoy it then you must have felt guilty!
And if you enjoyed it and didn’t feel guilty then admitting to this is pulling the honesty card! And honesty is the most horrible thing of all which proves once and for all that you are a shameless harlot!
It’s hilarious that you’re accused of denying your own feelings, when what you’re denying is somebody else’s declaration of what everyone’s feelings must be.
She’s the self-negator. You’re a self-affirmer.
Women are only most of humanity if you count all females (even infants) as women.
thanks for this post.
i think this is reflective of something more general in our society — that there is a certain class of people who seem to think that the same freudian psychology and insecurities and life goals and spending habits that apply to themselves can be equally applied to everybody, even those who actively deny it.
i could be talking about politics but my point is that people who hold this attitude seem to be everywhere, and i just don’t see how they get that way. i have several friends (thankfully not my closest ones) who often tell me what i think/like/feel about things, most often in the manner of contradicting what i say about myself (“yes you do!”). (incidentally, it seems that these people are mostly women. i don’t know why because my friends are mostly male.)
hey, at least lafsky isn’t a politician.
Excellent rebuttal Kerry. Strangely enough, there’s nothing more annoying to a ranting feminist than a truly rational woman. I think it’s just envy; rational people can’t be easily manipulated– you can only influence them by having a better argument (or by paying them off.) And since that Lafsky chick had no real argument against your position, all she could do was sputter about emotional fraud.
The hell … ? Why should women be so attached to our eggs anyway? No one expects men to agonize over sperm donation.
i’d like to say i’m glad i’m not the only one who has dealt with this, but in reality it is rather sad. i had considered egg donation while i was in college. it is an easy way to make some money and also gives you the opportunity to help someone else have their dream come true. however, all my friends and family members that i tried to talk to about it gave me big speeches about how it will emotionally damage me and i would regret it for the rest of my life; guilt trips about having kids running around that i would never know. i never got around to donating and right now it doesn’t really fit in with my life situation (newly married and not ready to have a[n accidental] baby… or to give up sex). i still support the idea and would probably consider it under different circumstances.
the adoption double standard really bothers me. if a woman gives her baby up for adoption for whatever reason she is considered brave. but she is under the same circumstances of having a biological child being raised by other people, the difference is that she carried the baby herself.
and im not even going to touch sperm donation.
overall, i feel if youre not using your reproductive cells theres no reason you shouldn’t be able to let someone else use them without overwhelming emotional agony and regret
This is such an insightful post.
This is like when a poster on Jezebel said that she had been date raped but didn’t feel traumatized and was attacked for it.
Also, this reminds me of how I wouldn’t have a problem with someone being in the sex trade if that porn star/prostitute that said that she did it because she enjoyed sex and that it wasn’t traumatizing–they are making money and depending on their circumstances/safety, there’s nothing wrong with that. However I do have a problem with a girl who is a prostitute who says she doesn’t enjoy it at all and literally describes feeling as if she is an object to be fucked in the films. Not that I have a problem with the girl, I just have a problem with the fact that someone would feel that they should do something that is obviously emotionally damaging them, as an individual.
Dear Kerry:
I donated my eggs awhile back. I don’t talk about it much, but then I also don’t go on about my wisdom teeth extraction because it’s really nobody’s business. I chose to be unmarried, and not have kids, so my rationale was “hey, I am not using those eggs, someone else can and I can get some benefit too, sign me up!” The people I do tell that I donated eggs are always mystified and troubled by my lack of caring about “potential children of mine” running around. When I explain I didn’t grow the a child, just provided the seed, I didn’t raise them emotionally or financially why should I spend my time being emotionally devasted about possibly having children I don’t know out there, the vast majority of people are horrified! that I can be so cold and unfeeling, and I must be psychologically damaged in some way that I am denying.
In this day and age women are still not allowed to not give a frack about children and especially children they might have created. And the biggest judgemental people are there are other women such as the huffington post writer. Frack them. You are entitled to your feelings, and the more of use who can destroy social memes like the one, “oh, you don’t know if you have children from your donated eggs, so you are psychologically unhinged” .
Yay! Egg donation /= end of world!
Still, I’m curious what you think of this whole industry existing in the first place, especially since there are risks associated with the procedure itself. I’m coming from the perspective that a very good friend of mine repeatedly had cysts develop and rupture in her ovaries, leading to life-threatening hemmorhaging and ER visits. These were entirely spontaneous occurrences (so far as I know, who knows, there could have been some dark secret something going on). Six months ago, her mother broadsided her with a demand for her eggs (!), as a Christmas gift (!!), for her beloved aunt who’d been going through infertility for years. Apparently, said aunt had brought it up with her. My friend is still being pressured to give up her eggs, despite the fact that she’s clearly higher-than-average-risk for the one serious complication I know about relating to the procedure. The whole situation read like exploitation to me, and the trend of older infertile women paying younger women to take on some medical risk when those women are economically disadvantaged left a bad taste in my mouth. Sure, the women with the eggs are free to make any decision they like and feel anyway they like about it, I’m more interested in the overall view.
“We bring “issues” like rape and abortion to the forefront in a show of power, but then shield ourselves in deadpan nihilism to avoid looking weak, even when we’re writing or speaking about how we were date raped, or sexually abused, or had our eggs sucked out through a needle.”
How can those be compared? You can’t choose to be date raped or sexually abused, but its your choice when you donate eggs.
I didn’t think common sense would be so uncommon after all.
You know what was kind of traumatizing? I signed up with like five egg donation programs and *none* of them wanted me.
I believe the reason was that at the time, my mother’s medical history was unknown — she was adopted — and she also had diabetes. So, ok. My eggs are not good enough because you don’t know what dark secrets lurk in them and those that you do know might be bad. But I was an attractive young woman who went to an Ivy League school on a merit scholarship, dammit, didn’t *anyone* want a piece of those genes? it made me feel bad that no one *wanted* my donated eggs.
At the time, to me, the whole “you have kids you don’t know about and never get to raise” was actually the *point*. I desperately wanted to know that my genes were continuing in the world. I also desperately wanted not to be pregnant. I knew pregnancy would destroy my body (as, eventually, it did, when I finally bit the bullet and had kids.) So I would have been like “Regret? The whole frigging *point* was to have my genetic material go on without having to suffer the physical or financial toll of raising them!” But when I was younger I was kind of an extreme Darwinist — like, I didn’t understand the concept of being childfree because to me, if you didn’t have kids and then you died, you lost at life. I have a more nuanced view of it now, and I also understand that most people don’t necessarily share my point of view, but… whoa. This woman had her mind made up as to what you should feel, and any deviation from that was proof that you weren’t in touch with your feelings, not an indication that maybe she was wrong.
My mother was adopted, so to me the idea that I would have children I’d never know didn’t bother me in the slightest — I already had aunts, uncles, cousins I’d never know, why not add to the pile? Now, I couldn’t give up a child for adoption, because I’m a woman — once you’ve already suffered pregnancy, and the baby is actually born and it’s real, I can’t see any reason to suffer giving it up. But giving up an *egg*? An egg’s not a baby. The woman who endures pregnancy is the mother of a human body (the person or persons who then raise the child are the parents of the human mind and soul, but the body, the life, exist because the gestating mother make them so.) You’re not a mother if you give up your genetic material; you’re a cuckoo, suckering someone else into doing all the work to make your genes live. Or you’re a man. Either way you win at Darwin. The “ooh, my baby” emotions don’t kick in until there’s actually a baby growing somewhere and you know about it. At least, I feel it would be that way for me.
Do men get hit up for human interest stories about if they regret donating sperm? I bet there are more of them who regret that then there are women who regret donating eggs (for purely emotional “oh my baby” reasons, at least; many women may regret donating eggs because it can damage their future fertility). Just because there are so many, many more men who donate sperm and they’re really not encouraged to think about the process at all, whereas women are in fact encouraged to think about and agonize over the decision to donate eggs. Women who decide that yes, they’ll regret this, are given many chances to back out; men aren’t really encouraged to think about it at all, and I wonder how many new fathers holding their babies suddenly think “Oh, shit, I wonder if any of those sperm donations made a cute little brother or sister for this one, and I’ll never know?”
Weird.
Has she been interviewing plasma sellers to see if they feel exploited?
Is she interviewing insulin-dependent diabetics to see if they feel humiliated?
Clearly, Lafsky cannot conceive that “NOT” is a valid answer to any of these questions. The maternal imperative in her world triumphs over everything else, including reason. I’m guessing she has a bumper sticker that says “It’s not a choice, it’s a baby”.
Wouldn’t it be cool if Huffington could be progressive and feminist, too?
I found the link for this post on feministing.com.
I have no experience selling my eggs, but I have thought about having children. It seems like the reasons that Melissa Lafsky gives for not selling one’s eggs are the same reasons that pregnancy seems very scary to me.
1) it being “frightening, or painful” and the manipulation of a womans body.
2) The trauma of “having your body invaded, your sense of control and power eliminated.”
Not to mention postpartum depression (http://www.feministing.com/archives/010174.html)
and/or any additional potential complications caused pregnancy and childbirth.
So if a woman wants to sell her eggs for whatever reason, thus helping someone else (that really wants to) actually have a child, and getting a monetary compensation, I see nothing wrong with the situation.
Damn! You’re awesome! I love the last line. There seems to be a tendency to make feminism more “friendly” by being sure to include a couple of lines about vulnerability, gratefulness, how “meaningful” something was, etc…
[...] here and at feministing had much to add to my post about the impermissibility of not [...]
[...] specifically, lead to the conclusion that it’s all just sound and fury? Not too long ago I was told how I felt about some elective surgery because, after all, other women feel that way. This is the [...]
I just wanted to say that I appreciate your decision for donating your eggs. As someone who is on the other side of the issue .. I cannot say how I would feel on the subject if it were not NEEDED for me, for my husband,to have children.
I have Premature Ovarian Failure (POF) and have about an 8% chance of conceiving on my own (maybe 15% with the hormones I have been taking for the past year). My endocrinologist informed me promptly after my diagnosis that egg donation or adoption were really my only chances of having a family. Luckily, my uterus is very healthy and a normal size. We are not against adoption, but I would love to have my husband’s children, and I want to be pregnant. We have decided egg donation is the right choice for us.
It must be hard for someone who is fertile to understand my feelings, my situation. The only question I have to someone who does not agree with egg donation {for whatever the reason} how would you feel if it were YOU, YOUR wife, YOUR daughter, or YOUR sister who was unable to have children? Tough luck? Too bad? I doubt it. You would probably be very appreciative of this opportunity so that they may have children. I know that I am.
I cannot say how I would feel about the situation if I were not in it. My guess is that I may be against it as well… So, therefore I cannot judge or be angry with people who do not believe it’s right. But in the same respect, the reason I think I would be against it would be due to my lack of understanding about the topic.. my lack of understanding for the women, the families involved.
I guess what I am saying is that it really isn’t anyone’s business. You really have no way of knowing what is right for someone else. I am VERY thankful for the women who choose to donate their eggs. I understand it is not an easy decision to come to. But my husband and I want children, want a family so badly, and we can’t do it on our own.
It would also be very appreciated if before someone comments or thinks something negatively about egg donation.. imagine being in a very happy relationship with the someone you love, very much wanting to start a family and a doctor, a stranger, telling you you CANNOT have children. There is nothing you can do to make your body do what it is supposed to.
Unless you have been there you cannot begin to understand the desperation, the anger, the frustration. But then.. there is some hope. Your doctor tells you that yes, you can get pregnant, your spouse can still have a biological child.. egg donation!
.. be a little more sympathetic, please.
God bless those women.. for giving my family the gift of life. Words will never be able to express my gratitude for what you do, the opportunity you have given my family.
Well said, finally a good report on this stuff
Great Post…..
I found your site on stumbleupon and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
Thanks for sharing….