The Dangers of Egg Donation: Being on the "Supply End of the Equation"
Hit this link to view a video presentation is by Calla Papademus, a young Stanford student who donated her eggs for a fertility treatment and suffered some serious health consequences. From an earlier story about her ordeal:
Papademus is now on permanent hormone replacement therapy and will have extreme difficulty having children. Think about her--and the women who have suffered even worse problems, including death--when "the scientists" urge women to give them their eggs for cloning research or push for an egg market: They aren't the ones who could potentially suffer the consequences.For eight weeks last fall, Calla Papademas, a 22-year-old Stanford graduate, slipped in and out of a coma in the intensive care unit at Stanford Hospital while her mother, Nancy, kept vigil...Months earlier, Calla had answered just such an ad, eventually agreeing to donate her eggs for a fee of $15,000. Now she was lying in a hospital bed, fighting for her life.
Calla had an extraordinarily rare reaction to Lupron, a synthetic hormone administered to prepare her body for egg donation. [Me: This is an off label use, the dangers of which I have commented on before.] A few days after Calla began the drug regimen, a benign, undetected tumor on her pituitary gland--which Calla's doctors believe was stimulated by the Lupron--grew at a furious rate and ultimately ruptured, causing a massive stroke. Calla suffered brain damage and lasting weakness on her left side. Her academic and career plans were derailed, and she and her family incurred $100,000in uninsured medical bills.
Key quote from the video:
"Now I have had very up close personal experience watching myself as the supply end of this whole equation and to be treated as if I don't matter unless I perform and supply, which I didn't."This too is an example of the instrumentalization of human life that is a growing problem in our increasingly I-I/Me-Me society.
Labels: Egg Donation.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 9:38 PM
8 Comments
8 Comments:
The last comment regarding this being another example of the instrumentalization of human life and how it contributes to or stems from the me/I factor in American culture is a bulls eye.
I read the article and the thing that frightens me most is the instrumentalization of kids. I wonder if we are abusing the word "parent" by calling these people "parents" when they are sifting through genes of women and trying to manufacture the kind of child they want. How are we to trust these people with kids who are looking for a certain kind of child and only a certain kind will do? Who would want to have "parents" with those kinds of expectations of them? So much for unconditional love.
I don't think there will be much more than a little sympathy from the research community or the IVF community for the young lady who was harmed during the egg procurement process. I think the abortion movement’s unwillingness to address the impact of abortion on women and their unwillingess to regulate their bad operators tells me that this young woman too will be one more person who is expendable for the greater good of the cause.
I think we should call people who shop for eggs and interview the egg donors, compare the traits of the women and etc, we should call these people consumers more than parents.
Wes, I'm with you on this one for sure. The dangers (known and unknown) involved in harvesting ova are far too great for this to be something that is done casually or for profit. I'm generally in favor of other markets (blood, organs, etc) but this one seems too dangerous and morally murky to be allowed at this time.
Don: Why is it that you don't think that someone who 'designs' a child could be a good parent? Seems to me that they have as good a chance of being a good parent as anyone else. Why do you suspect that they wouldn't love their child as much as if they had a random child in the normal way? 'Randomness = love' is a weird equation.
My sister in law underwent the hormone BLAST treatment (here I refer not to blastocyst but to the SUPERCHARGED injections she received in order to stimulate eggs for the in vitro fertilization treatments she attempted).
She shortly thereafter kicked into early menopause. (The fertility doctors denied any connection.)
Women treated as COWS.
This is why I shudder also at the ads I've seen in college papers for women to donate their eggs...and why I shudder when I hear that MOST of California
s new embryonic stem cell research clinics are located on campus.
Actually I also get angry. Beware, any such administrator who crosses my path.
No physical threats will you get, but you will get my blunt opinion. (And they can invoke "Godwin's Law" all they want. I will cite both the Bible and---HG Wells - that great secular prophet of 20th 21st century techno abuse.
Matteson, thanks for the comment. I don't know if you are one of those guys who tried to manufacture his or her child's genes. I guess it is possible that someone who flies egg and sperm donors across the country to try to determine the kind of kid with the kind of genes and persona that they want so they don't get a kid they don't want could possibly be a loving parent. But I doubt the child could completely trust those parents once the child found out and grasped the horror of being manufactured and created according to spec, or created in their image.
I think the equation that someone would scour the nation for a specific set of genes and could have the kind of unconditional love and acceptance of that child to be a good and loving parent is the more weird equation. How do you trust your parents who had you manufactured according to certain specs and brought you into existence to meet their own needs and so much so that they tried to determine your characteristics and persona? To me this is treating kids and human beings as means to an end and not ends in themselves. It commodifies the child. The parents may think they have good intentions, but in the end they manufactured this kind of child. They appear to be consumers more than parents.
I think I've been pretty confident my family loved me and I was their boy, grandson no matter what. There was never a doubt that I would be genuinely loved no matter what package I was wrapped in or the contents I had on board. When I was 11, I fell some 14+ feet through an open stair well on the unfinished addition of our home and landed on my head. SHS probably thinks that explains everything:). The fall and landing which I don't remember, created a skull fracture and punctured my ear drum. My parents and family didn't know if I would live, be paralyzed, get spinal menangitis, suffer brain damage and etc. But no matter how things turned out there was never any doubt that I was their child and they were going to love and accept me no matter how it ended. It would never have occured to them or occured to others that they would think, "what's happened to our investment?"
I have a problem with what i believe to be an unneeded surgical risk for cash profit but I agree with surrogacy. I also believe that people are not considered bad parents parents for wanting to have a child that looks like them. A black child with asuan parents is more likely to be teased to standing out then a fair skin fair eyed child with fair skinned light eyed parents. If it's done for the child's interest it's different than choosing the "perfect" embryo
also many of these families are not out to 'manufacture' the perfect child, when adopting many parents do the same thing looking through many agencies and profiles for children all over the world. To simply walk in off the street and say "surprise me' would be possibly more detrimental to the child. It is sad that yes some sick-minded person may view them as an investment but most if not all have tried very hard for a very long time to conceive with no luck and they should not be penalized for wanting a child of their own.
What about this true life fact. My daughter has not only donated eggs but has been a surrogate with her own egg many times. My family and her dad's family suffer from intense alcoholism, mental illness and obesity. I have already seen one granddaughter go down in flames from addiction. The people adopting these eggs or her children are not informed about this fact. If they were they would run the other way. Buyer Beware!
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