Compensation for Egg Donation

In researching on scholar. google.com found an interesting article from the NEJM that I will use for my ILP.

"Egg Donation and Human Embryonic Stem-Cell Research" by Robert Steinbrook, M.D.

The article discusses the issue of compensation for Egg donation which is something I will write about in my ILP. I will use this information in my ILP.

"Research subjects frequently accept risks in order to benefit others, without any chance of benefiting themselves.⁴ There is general agreement that laboratory workers should not be egg donors, because their position as subordinates makes it impossible for their donations to be considered fully voluntary. There is also little support for oocyte sharing, in which a woman who is undergoing ovarian stimulation for her own reproductive purposes would be charged a lower fee if she donated some of her eggs to another woman or for use in research. Among the objections are that this approach mixes infertility treatment with research and that it may reduce the donor's chances of becoming pregnant, particularly if few oocytes are produced.

Compensation for egg donation is a particularly contentious issue. In the United States, men are usually compensated for sperm donations, and research subjects are usually compensated when they undergo invasive procedures, such as bronchoscopy or endoscopy. It is inconsistent to compensate subjects for undergoing certain invasive procedures but not others or to allow compensation for egg donation for reproductive purposes but not for research. Moreover, whereas the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 prohibits the transfer "of any human organ for valuable consideration for use in a human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce," federal law neither bans nor directly regulates payments for gametes and embryos. A related issue is that although the commercial potential of stem-cell research is huge, research subjects have no ownership rights in the technology and will not share the financial or other benefits.

Some bioethicists argue that egg donors should be compensated — on the basis of the time and discomfort associated with the process, not the number and quality of the eggs that are produced. According to Bonnie Steinbock, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany who has studied egg donation, in the absence of a consensus that no egg donor should be compensated, payment for donations for research is ethically acceptable.⁵ In an interview, Steinbock explained: "Any time that we ask people to do things that impose significant burdens and some degree of risk, fairness may require that they be adequately compensated. At the same time, there's a general consensus that it would be improper to offer enormous sums of money to egg donors that could sway their judgment."

Despite the reasons for compensating donors, payment for research donations was prohibited in 2005 in Massachusetts and, in 2004, under the stem-cell research initiative in California. Such payments have also been banned in South Korea (although they were legal at the time when some of the donors of eggs used in Hwang's research were paid). In 2005, the National Academies recommended in its "Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research" that no payments should be provided for donating eggs, sperm, or blastocysts for research. Jonathan Moreno, the cochair of the National Academies committee and a professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Virginia, said in an interview that the recommendations were justified by the sensitivity of egg donation for stem-cell research and by uncertainties about theactual risk of severe complications in donors. The committee's recommendation has been criticized — for example, by John Robertson of the University of Texas School of Law at Austin, who has written extensively on stem-cell research. In a commentary on a bioethics Web site, Robertson said the committee "made a political choice to get the field moving, not an ethical one grounded in sound analysis."