“The debt that leads many women to egg donation is a result of the elite education that makes their…

“The debt that leads many women to egg donation is a result of the elite education that makes their eggs desirable”

At the New Inquiry, an essay by Moira Donegan on egg donation:

In the 1970s, Italian feminists sought to attack characterizations of women’s domestic activities as naturally preordained by assigning them monetary value. “Wages for housework,” went one slogan. “Every miscarriage is a work accident,” was another. At the time, this was all just theoretical; more than anything, the demand to conceive of reproduction as work was a rhetorical device aimed at destroying habitual patterns of thought. Money is transformative that way. It can change an act of love into an act of work, and it can also change an infertile woman into a mother-to-be, or a promising student into a woman injecting her abdomen with hormones.

She presents a sort of twinning I’d never thought about before:

It is not hard to understand that having a degree is no longer any guarantee of a livable income… What’s more confounding is the way that the student debt burdens that lead many women to egg donation are the result of the same elite educations that make their eggs desirable, and the way that many egg donors, in their aspirations and experiences, so closely resemble the people who are purchasing their services.

But what shows up on the donor profiles (“I am a model and often am stopped in the street and asked about whether I do modeling or not,” says #60395. “I want to bring happiness to others. It’s so heart-warming to see a family completed”) is slightly different, and Donegan talks about egg donation being “happiness work, the job of being happy for the successes of other people.”

Donors do not say, at least not out loud, that they want to donate “because I need the money.” It would be professionally dangerous to do so.

The rest of it is here, and now I’m rereading this great little piece from 2011, “Four Good Reasons to Donate Your Eggs & A Couple Dozen Reasons Not To.”