Fertility clinics around the country have egg ‘donation’ programs that solicit and recruit young women to harvest their youthful human eggs.  Anonymous egg donation is being encouraged.

Each girl, when she is born, is born with a large quantity of eggs.  What many women don’t realize is that the viability of the eggs in her ovaries begins to rapidly diminish after the age of 35.

Women have been delaying marriage and children for a variety of reasons, but the result may be a rise in the rate of infertility and the need to turn to medical science to achieve pregnancy.

But is buying human eggs the right solution?  Is it ethical to pay a young woman for a number of her healthy eggs?  ($5,000.00+++) Have there been any studies regarding the long-term effects on the eggs donor’s fertility or other impacts on her health?


“A woman’s eggs are fully formed and stowed away in her ovaries from before birth. Each mature egg contains one copy of each gene in the human genome—half the amount necessary for life. (Each sperm also contains a single copy of each gene in the human genome.)

The maximum number of eggs that a woman will ever have is the number she has when she’s a 20-week-old fetus. She’ll have about 7 million of them then, 600,000 when she’s born, and about 400,000 at puberty. Once a woman hits puberty and menstruation begins, her ovaries release one of those eggs every 28 or so days.”
Dr. Michael Roizen, MD, Internal Medicine, You Having a Baby

Embryo donation might be a better solution for some families.  Human embryos are not (or should not be) bought or sold.  Human embryos are considered property in the U.S.  To acquire human embryos a family would likely incur some administrative or legal costs, but they would not incur the cost of purchasing human eggs or the cost of in vitro fertilization.

Give us your opinion about the purchase of human eggs vs. the use of donated embryos remaining from a couples’ IVF treatment.

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