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….

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.

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.

“whether or not it felt exploitative to sell a piece of their genetic material,”

Has she been interviewing plasma sellers to see if they feel exploited?

“whether or not it was humiliating, frightening, or painful to manipulate their bodies with constant drugs and surgeries,”

Is she interviewing insulin-dependent diabetics to see if they feel humiliated?

“whether or not it bothered them to produce genetic offspring that they’d never know or raise”

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 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?”

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.

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.

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” .

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.

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