Business Description
When patients consider a medical procedure, they may be told “there are no known long-term effects.” But unless such effects have been systematically studied, that does not mean there are no long-term effects.
That’s a major concern for Dr. Jennifer Schneider, mother of a three-time egg donor, Jessica Grace Wing. Ms. Wing was a tall, lean, attractive, athletic and musically talented Stanford University student when she decided to donate her eggs to help pay for her education. Through her multiple donations, five healthy children were born to three formerly childless families.
When her mother asked if egg donation was safe, Ms. Wing said she was told it was. What she did not know at the time was that no one had ever looked beyond the short-term effects of the many hormone injections needed to stimulate the release of multiple eggs at one time.
Four years after her third donation, Ms. Wing, then 29, learned she had metastatic colon cancer. Despite the best available treatment, she died at 31 in 2003, just days after completing the music for an opera called “Lost” that was presented three weeks later in New York.
Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE
Should young women sell their eggs? OCT. 20, 2016
Personal Health
What I Wish I’d Known About My Knees
JUL 3
When Anxiety or Depression Masks a Medical Problem
JUN 26
Who Really Needs to Be Gluten-Free?
JUN 19
Social Interaction Is Critical for Mental and Physical Health
JUN 12
Feeding Young Minds: The Importance of School Lunches
JUN 5
See More »
Ms. Wing’s cancer may have been totally unrelated to her egg donations. But given that Ms. Wing had been a health-conscious young woman with no family history of colon cancer or genes associated with this disease, Dr. Schneider wondered if the extensive hormone treatments her daughter had undergone might have stimulated growth of the cancer and if other egg donors might also be at risk.
Alas, she soon discovered, it was impossible to know because no one was keeping track of the medical or psychological fate of egg donors. Once donors walk out the door, they are essentially lost to medical history.
Dr. Schneider began vigorously advocating for establishment of an egg donor registry that could benefit not only the thousands of healthy young women whose eggs help others get pregnant, but also the growing number of women who want to postpone pregnancy and choose to have their eggs frozen for future use.
But 14 years after her daughter’s death, there is still no one tracking the fate of egg donors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collects information on in vitro fertilization, but not on those who donate their eggs either anonymously or to family members or friends unable to get pregnant with their own eggs.
There are not even reliable data on the number of egg donors. The best statistic I could find was the number of donor eggs that were used for in vitro fertilization, which increased to 18,306 in 2010 from 10,801 in 2000.
Fertility clinics and egg-donor agencies advertise broadly, especially on college campuses and even on New York subways, for donors, who are typically paid $5,000 to $10,000 for each donation, even more if the woman satisfies a fertility client’s specifications. One woman wrote in The Atlantic that she had responded to an offer for $25,000 in The Yale Daily News for “a young woman over five feet five, of Jewish heritage, athletic, with a combined SAT score of 1500, and attractive.”
For more details :
Startup Marketing Video
