AS THE SAYING GOES, KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE AND YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER: A young women's eggs are now considered a scientific commodity. According to an article in the 3/15/2006 issue of USA Today: "...fertility clinics and brokers are bidding up prices for eggs sold by cash-strapped college women with top test scores and picture-perfect looks." "Donors typically are 18 to early30's, when women are most fertile and eggs are healthiest." "A sharp increase in embryonic stem-cell research programs across the USA in the past year created a new market for more donors as scientists use eggs to find medical cures." "In Arizona, the House just passed bills that would ban donor payments and require doctors to tell women about health risks that in rare cases include death." "One of the biggest clinics, Genetics and IVF Institute near Washington, DC, offers an online catalog of 100 donors in a database searchable by race, height, eye color, blood type and education. Profiles feature snapshots of donors taken when they were children to better visualize babies their eggs might produce." "Prospective parents want donors who look and behave much like the baby they dream of, even though there's no guarantee. The result: escalating fees for beautiful women with perfect grades -- a 'morally troubling' development akin to eugenics..." And in the same article, a side-bar concerning the related issue of stem cell research: "States hope researchers will discover cures for diseases, creating high-paying jobs. Scientists mostly work with unused embryos stored at fertility clinics. But for the newest research, they need unfertilized eggs. Scientists remove the egg's DNA, then replace it with DNA from another donor. The resulting embryo is destroyed. Its stem cells are then harvested for further research." Prices paid to young women vary widely, with $5,000 to $10,000 being the norm for one extraction of, on average, 10 to 15 eggs. Here are two problems: 1) The temptation for some mid-wives, especially those who offer home birth, to recruit a surrogate mother and then offer a "designer adoption" to wealthy clients must be difficult to resist. How much would a wealthy couple pay to adopt a healthy, blond-haired, blue-eyed son or daughter of biological parents both of whom are athletic, artistic, and have high IQ's.? And a mid-wife who offers home birth is in a unique position to offer a truly discreet adoption. The biological parents are entirely unaware of the birth, the surrogate mother is simply renting the use of her uterus, and the adoptive parents purchase, at least from a strictly genetic point of view, a highly desirable child. Sort of a transfer. A very profitable one. 2) As demand rises, I would not be surprised to see egg brokers, knowingly or unknowingly, hawking the eggs harvested from kidnapped young females. A healthy, attractive, athletic, smart young woman, say 16 years old, would have roughly 300 eggs, maybe more. The equivalent of 30 extractions of 10 high-quality eggs would, at a black market price, be worth nearly a half-million dollars. And that's before they're used in stem cell research, in legitimate assisted reproduction, or in "designer adoptions." The disturbed and/or abusive male should no longer be considered the only possible suspect in a young woman's otherwise unexplained disappearance. Reproductive medicine, too, has a motive.

Author: storagehead
Keywords: Maura Murray Molly Bish Weymouth Warren Massachusetts Mass MA Lindsey Ferguson Saratoga Springs storagehead
Added: February 3, 2008

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