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:

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.

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.

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.