Eggs Buy a College Education

Slipping away from Harvard for a week last June, a PhD candidate named Rachel, a tall strawberry blond with a creamy complexion and blue-green eyes, jetted to San Francisco for an unusual tryst.

Awaiting her was a wealthy Bay Area couple, desperate for a baby, willing to pay Rachel thousands of dollars to help them realize their dream.

The middle-age husband and wife, who found Rachel through a San Diego broker, were attracted as much to her slender, 5-foot-11 frame and Norwegian ancestry as they were to her Ivy League pedigree.

“You look even more gorgeous than the pictures,” she recalled one of the pair saying.

The next morning, under general anesthesia, a needle poked into Rachel’s ovaries and harvested 17 eggs ripened by weeks of hormone shots. They were then fertilized with the husband’s sperm and implanted into the wife’s womb.

For her donation, Rachel made about $18,000, just enough to cover a semester at an Ivy League school. She was back in California again in February--this time in San Diego, to do business with another couple.

“I asked for a little more this time,” she said, “and they agreed to it.”

California has become the center of a flourishing egg-donation industry that increasingly recruits women from university campuses nationwide.

“Pay your tuition with eggs,” reads one of the ubiquitous advertisements in college newspapers. California brokers now recruit heavily from the nation’s top academic institutions--Harvard, Yale and Stanford--promoting their donors’ eggs on Web sites and in brochures as name-brand genetic material.

With the number of egg transplants--each usually involving multiple eggs--surpassing 7,000 in 1998 and doubling every two to three years, the fierce competition has forced brokers to offer ever larger financial enticements.

Ads promising payments as high as six figures have created a split in the once low-profile industry, raising ethical concerns about targeting young women who are struggling with the spiraling costs of higher education.

More established egg brokers accuse brash newcomers of crude recruiting tactics that stress short-term gain and downplay the risks of hormone treatments and invasive surgery.

“What would you do if you sent your child away to the university and you found out she was donating her eggs?” says longtime broker Karen Synesiou, director of Egg Donation Inc. in Beverly Hills, who no longer advertises in campus newspapers because she believes that most undergraduates are too young to provide the service.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “I’ve had parents call me up and say, ‘How could you do this to my daughter?’ ”

Rachel, at first, was thinking only about money when she spotted an ad in her college paper seeking a tall woman with at least 1400 out of a perfect 1600 SAT score. Then 23, she was pursuing a master’s degree at Yale, piling on debt from student loans.

“It was the dollar figure that attracted me,” said Rachel, who like most donors asked that only her first name be used. “It was a full-page ad. I opened it up and saw that it was $50,000 and said, ‘All right!’ ”

Though she was turned down by the first couple when she answered the $50,000 ad, Rachel was eventually selected by the childless pair in San Francisco.

“Once you meet them and you see how excited they are, you say, ‘Wow, it’s more than just the money,’ ” she said.

There was something satisfying too in getting chosen after nearly a year of being sized up by couples who did everything from quiz her about her tennis game to measure her shoulders.

“It’s neat to be picked,” she said. “Someone actually wants you.”

$50,000 for All the Right Genes

Egg Donor Needed. Large Financial Incentive. Intelligent, athletic egg donor needed for loving family. You must be at least 5’10”. Have a 1400+ SAT score. Possess no major family medical issues. $50,000. Free medical screening. All Expenses Paid.

This ad, answered by Rachel and about 200 other women, was placed by broker Darlene Pinkerton in campus newspapers at Ivy League schools, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and Caltech, two years ago. As the first ad offering such an extravagant sum, it opened the egg-brokerage business to a whole new breed of start-up companies.

Since then, others have bid up the price even more. One ad in UCLA’s Daily Bruin offered $80,000 to a Caucasian woman with an SAT score of about 1300. “Extra compensation available for someone who might be especially gifted in athletics, science/mathematics or music,” it read.

A Newport Beach agency still holds the record with its Stanford Daily ad in March 2000 offering $100,000 for eggs of a white woman under 30 with “proven college-level athletic ability preferred.”

Businesses that don’t handle big-money donors often make up for it in volume. OPTIONS National Fertility Registry, which generally limits donor fees to $5,000, advertises regularly in 60 campus newspapers. About 200 college women answer the ads every day, their questions fielded by operators standing by.

Rory McGlynn, OPTIONS assistant director, said his brokerage coordinates 1,000 egg transfers a year from its office in Los Angeles. “These girls don’t sit on our database for long,” he said.

Brokers typically collect commissions of $3,000 to $5,000 or more for each match. All that cash has attracted a new sort of aggressive entrepreneur with brazen marketing and sales tactics.

“It has moved from a gentlemanly marketplace of insiders to a more open, flamboyant marketplace,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics. “There is not much difference between those ads and what goes on with prize breeding of animals.”

The newer brokers push eye-grabbing ads that offer $25,000, $50,000 or more for women with the right combination of beauty and brains.

Some question whether the promises are merely an attempt to lure cash-hungry donors onto the brokers’ registries--where they are then available to couples at significantly lower fees.

Synesiou, the longtime Beverly Hills broker critical of the upstarts, said, “They are fake ads to attract media attention and a lot of donors. Believe me, the donors are going to be told, ‘You don’t qualify for the $80,000, but I have another couple. You would get $5,000.’ ”

At Pinkerton’s agency, A Perfect Match, which ran the nation’s first $50,000 ad, only two donors have made that amount, Pinkerton said. Rachel and many other respondents ended up settling for less. The average donor fee, she said, runs about $10,000.

The new brokers aim their ads at what they consider the genetic elite. “You don’t go to a community college to get someone with a 1400 SAT,” Pinkerton said. “You go to the Ivy League.”

On some campuses, solicitations are everywhere.

“The women in my class get inundated with requests to be donors,” said Dorothy Greenfield, director of psychological services at Yale’s Center for Reproductive Medicine. “It shows up in their e-mail.”

It also popped up at UC San Diego’s career center, through the online Job Trak listing service.

“We put a stop to that,” said Neil Murray, the center’s director. “This wasn’t a job.” For the same reason, Murray rejected an egg broker’s proposal to set up a booth at a campus job fair.

California on the Leading Edge

California has a higher concentration of egg brokers than anywhere else in the nation, a phenomenon attributable to a combination of factors--from pioneering efforts in fertility treatments to an anything-goes culture.

California has pushed the boundaries of fertility medicine for decades: in use of surrogate mothers, for example, or sperm banks stocked by Nobel laureates. Such efforts have attracted an unusual number of doctors and lawyers specializing in the field, and that in turn has spawned self-styled entrepreneurs.

All this activity has fostered a hospitable legal climate, including case law that allows egg brokers to operate the way they do.

Unlike East Coast agencies, which swaddle donors in secrecy, California brokers allow infertile couples to choose their donors--scrutinize their pictures, learn their family histories, even take them to dinner.

Most California egg brokers offer online registries. Type in certain characteristics--hair, eye color, ethnicity--and voila, up pops a list of prospects.

Conceptual Options in San Diego breaks its list into two groups, donors and higher-priced “extraordinary donors.”

One of those on the extraordinary list is Valerie, a stunning brunet with a perfect smile and an astounding resume. At age 23, she is a third-year medical student in California. She’s 5 feet 8, a National Merit Scholar, professional ballerina, competitive equestrian and award-winning athlete. She “requests $50,000+ compensation,” according to her online profile.

Some brokers rely blatantly on sex appeal.

The Center for Egg Options Inc. in Manhattan Beach, which advertises regularly in the Daily Bruin, sends out literature to potential recipient couples featuring bikini-clad “donors” in pinup poses.

“It’s insulting,” said a 44-year-old egg recipient who turned elsewhere to find a donor.

Put yourself in the shoes of a typical recipient, she said. “She already feels awful [that] she cannot get pregnant on her own, and you are sending her photos of these women with fabulous bodies? Are you supposed to show this to your husband? ‘Hey, honey, check this out!’ ”

The center declined to comment.

Pinkerton, meanwhile, defends the recruitment of college students. It’s patronizing to second-guess the students’ decisions, she said. No one questions the motivation of sperm donors, she said, or the young men who risk injury in pursuit of lucrative football careers.

“But suddenly people think a woman isn’t intelligent enough to make a decision when faced with money,” Pinkerton said. “If they feel the least uncomfortable, $50,000 will not make these women do something they don’t want to do.”

Motivated by Altruism

In a relatively new industry, Mikki Rettig is what might be called an old-fashioned donor.

From the time she first spotted an ad in the UC Riverside paper, she said, she was motivated mostly by altruism, moved by the plight of families unable to conceive.

“These poor people are having to go through treatment for something that came so naturally for me,” said Rettig, now a doting mother of a son in Thousand Oaks. “I wanted to be able to help.”

Four times over the last five years, she has injected herself daily with a regimen of fertility drugs and then, under anesthesia, donated her eggs. She has never been paid more than $2,500 per donation.

“I don’t think anyone in their right mind would do this without compensation,” she said. But she said that was never her primary motivation.

Fertility doctors and counselors say Rettig’s altruistic spirit runs through most donors. Many receive $3,500 or less.

But the motivations of donors--and recipient couples--are complex. And they are made much more so by the infusion of big money into the transaction.

The newer ads are drawing a different sort of woman, with different priorities.

“It seems [it was] a much more altruistic thing before,” said Helen Rosenberg, a Rutgers University professor. Now, she said, “students are beginning to feel a bit like whores, and their brokers are madams.”

Rosenberg has not only published studies on the motives of egg donors, she has given birth to two children from donated eggs and is an active broker. In her words, she’s an “egg-donor yenta,” or matchmaker.

She finds donors to be highly social, outgoing, the type who join sororities. “They are physical risk-takers. They see it like going to Africa to help poor people or jumping out of an airplane.”

But, she said, “the motivating force is not just altruism; it’s narcissism. I’ve interviewed 1,100 college girls and they all say, ‘My genes are wonderful, and my eggs should be out there.’ ”

She and counselors who screen donors are disturbed, moreover, about the ever-larger role of money in the equation.

The money is particularly alluring to women attending top private universities, which now cost $32,000 to $35,000 a year.

Psychologists say that even students from upper-middle-class families can find themselves torn between mortgaging their future with student loans and guiltily asking their parents for more money. Fast money from egg donation can look like an easy way out.

“I don’t know how I would have gotten through without it,” said Amy, a 27-year-old graduate student in Northern California. “My [graduate] program is private and really expensive. I was taking out a lot of loans. This was a fairly easy way to make money.”

Always in demand, the former model with blue eyes offset by an olive complexion and a mane of curly brown hair has cleared a total of $22,000 from four donations.

As far as she knows, her genetic progeny include two sets of twins and a single birth. She received some pictures of one infant. It rattled her. “The newborn picture was weird, because it looked just like me,” she said.

She doesn’t know if she’d ever want to meet these children. “It’s slightly nerve-racking, in case I don’t tell my [future] husband. It would be OK if they called and made an appointment.”

Still, she said she has had no second thoughts about giving up her eggs. “I look at it like a blood donor. It’s something I’m not using, so if it can help somebody else, why not?”

Unlike sperm, which can be frozen and banked until needed, eggs must be fresh to be viable.

So college women fly into Los Angeles or other cities to rendezvous with older women, their cycles chemically synchronized so they can transfer eggs at just the right moment.

Sometimes donors find the experience chilly and clinical. Other times, they are embraced by couples warmly, treated almost as a new member of the family.

Amy has seen both extremes. What bothered her the most at first, she said, was feeling lonely and vulnerable on the cab ride to surgery. But during the last cycle, she met the recipient couple over dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Santa Monica. They swapped life histories.

“The mom and I have weird similarities,” Amy said. “We are both vegetarians for a long time. The husband is a guitar player, and my brother is a guitar player. We [both] do yoga and meditation.”

The mother-to-be shuttled Amy between the doctor’s office and the airport. “It wasn’t awkward at all,” she said. “It was easy.”

The ranks of recipients are growing. Demand for donor eggs has climbed dramatically in recent years as aging baby boomers, after years of putting off childbearing, try to conceive.

Eager recipients fly to California from all around the country to find their match. They come from overseas too, where Britain and other nations forbid donors from getting paid.

“California has become a site of reproductive tourism,” said Lori Andrews, professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law and author of “The Clone Age,” which covers such topics. “Everyone seems to want those blond California girls.”

For the most part, recipients are infertile or are approaching the end of their fertile years and have exhausted other fertility techniques involving their own eggs.

“Everyone knows I’ve gone through hell trying to have a baby,” said one pregnant woman who turned to an egg donor. “I’ve done [in vitro fertilization] many, many times with my own eggs. I failed all of them. My doctor said I was wasting my time.”

This woman, like other recipients of donated eggs, agreed to be interviewed only if guaranteed anonymity. Only her husband knows about the genetic origins of the child she’s carrying.

“I want to feel this baby is totally my own,” she said. “I have not decided if I want others to know this is a donor egg.”

Clicking Around the Internet

The woman, who lives in the Midwest, turned to a California broker to find someone who more closely matches her Asian heritage. She clicked her way around various online registries until she found a donor she liked.

“She’s very beautiful,” she said. “I don’t look as good as she does. I saw her picture, and her resume is very impressive.”

Soon the woman jetted off to Denver to be implanted with the eggs of her selected donor, a 28-year-old graduate student of Japanese descent--all coordinated by Families 2000+, a broker in Newport Beach.

The two never met face to face. Instead, the woman sent her donor a thank-you card and received a nice note in return.

“We know each other’s first name, but not the last name. On the day of [egg] retrieval, I gave her a little gift, a Louis Vuitton purse, monogram, brown leather. It’s my favorite purse.”

Of course, there was also the $7,000 fee she paid the donor--part of $40,000 in medical and other expenses. Recipients more typically pay $15,000 to $30,000, brokers say.

The woman settled on egg donation, rather than adoption, partly for herself and partly for her husband. “He is such a good man; I’ve got to pass on his genes.”

Moreover, she said, “this baby feels 110% mine.”

“This is Darwin’s ‘Natural Selection’ at its very best,” reads the Web site for Ron’s Angels. “The highest bidder gets youth, beauty and social skills.”

Ron Harris, a Malibu fashion photographer, hoped to inspire a bidding war over the eggs of beautiful models he featured on this site.

But he also ignited an ethical debate. It erupted on morning and late-night network TV shows, in magazines and newspapers. Critics--both inside and outside the industry--condemned what they considered his unabashed promotion of free-market eugenics.

USC bioethics expert Alex Capron said Harris simply sits on an extreme edge of an industry that treats human eggs as commodities.

“We are not giving help to the infertile; we are selling beauty, brains or brawn to buyers,” said Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania.

Some of the issues raised in egg donation are similar to those that arise in donation of sperm--but there are big differences: Men’s sperm is far more plentiful than women’s eggs, the medical risks of egg donation are greater and--perhaps most important--there is a lot more money involved.

With so many dollars at stake, Caplan and others worry about donors’ behavior. A $50,000 fee could seduce a college donor into discounting the rare, but very real, risks of infection, infertility and even death.

A cash-strapped donor might neglect to disclose a family history of cancer. Or she might gloss over the possibility of her child’s someday knocking on her door, seeking his biological mother.

After months of debate, fertility doctors and other members of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommended last year that donor fees be limited to $5,000. Anything more, the society determined, could be coercive.

Lawmakers, however, have been reluctant to set down rules in the fast-changing field.

Federal law prohibits the sale of human organs, but it doesn’t cover sperm or eggs. The sale of human eggs is legal in every state except Louisiana.

Still, since it began more than 15 years ago, the industry has used the word “donate.” Women are technically compensated for their time, effort and inconvenience, rather than their eggs.

“People would have a visceral opposition to a direct sale. We use euphemisms to make it more palatable,” said Andrew W. Vorzimer, a Beverly Hills attorney who writes 600 contracts a year for recipient couples to protect them should a dispute arise.

‘Shopping’ for Genes

By far, the questions surrounding gene-shopping are most troubling to ethicists.

Capron of USC says parents who have to give up on genetic offspring sometimes hunt for a child who satisfies other ego needs: better looks, athletic ability or whatever would make them prouder parents. Their attitude, he said, is: “I want the best child, the way I want the best car, and I’m willing to pay for it.”

Darlene Pinkerton, however, said that was the last thing on the minds of the highly educated couple who inspired the ad that kicked off the craze for higher-priced eggs.

Sure, the couple sought a donor who was at least 5-foot-10, she said. “What people don’t understand is that the woman is 5-foot-11 and the husband is 6-foot-5.

“They want a tall child,” she said. “People are not trying to create a super-athlete or super-intelligent being. They are trying to match themselves.”

It is true, brokers say, that women of Asian descent look for donors with similar heritage. Jewish families want Jewish donors. Most women seek to match their height, hair and eye color, and most brokers encourage parents to pick donors who resemble them. That way, after all the expense and trouble, they don’t end up with a child who looks adopted.

Still, agencies report a steady stream of would-be parents smitten by the human tendency to want to improve on nature.

Rosenberg, the “egg-donor yenta,” gets impatient with the shallowness of “incredibly thin” aspiring mothers who reject donors for being too heavy.

“They say to me, ‘I don’t know, I would really hate to have a fat kid.’ Or when I hear them say, ‘I want her to be tall, blond, athletic [with] SATs over 1400,’ I tell them, ‘You are in the wrong place.’ ”

Still, for recipient couples, beauty often plays as large a role as any other characteristic, brokers say. That reflects a broad misunderstanding of the genetics Mixmaster--a beautiful mother, as many a homely child knows, does not guarantee beautiful offspring.

“It’s a crapshoot,” Rosenberg tells prospective parents.

In fact, no characteristic can be guaranteed--or guaranteed against. That “raises the questions of disappointment and false promises, scamming and product liability,” Caplan said. He predicts lawsuits claiming, “You told me I’d get a Grade A egg and I got a child with a genetic defect.”

He and others fear that egg-selling has become a business fraught with moral--and perhaps legal--peril.

“There is all this talk of donation, helping another couple,” Caplan said. “But clearly it’s a business, selling the best available stock that money can buy.”

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Egg Options

More women every year are using donor eggs to help them get pregnant and give birth to a child they can call their own. Such egg transfers have grown annually since the medical technique first resulted in a live birth in 1983.

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Wanted: Eggs at Any Price

Advertisements in college newspapers solicit eggs from students. Some offer top dollar to women, often enrolled at elite universities, who have the desired mix of beauty, brains and brawn. Their eggs, in turn, are marketed as name-brand genetic material.