:: kat :: ([info]_wirehead_) wrote,
@ 2008-07-11 16:03:00
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in which i talk about my ovaries.
i had egg retrieval surgery yesterday morning, closing out my second donation cycle. (the first was last december.) from start to finish, this one was SO much easier than the first time. part of it was knowing what to expect in terms of side effects, being comfortable giving myself shots, etc. but also, they only got 11 eggs this time (last time it was something like 27).

it made a HUGE difference in how uncomfortable i was for the week leading up to the surgery, as well as the recovery time. last time, i was super sore for at least 3-4 days afterward, and didn't feel back to normal for more than a week. today, though, i am hardly in any pain at all -- i'm back at work and unless i do something that jostles my innards (like taking stairs too quickly), i feel completely fine.

why the difference in the number of eggs? the nurses didn't really know; they said that every cycle is different. i feel a little bad because i'd like to give that anonymous woman the best chance in the world to have a child, but it's not like it was affected by anything i did (or didn't do). though i kind of wonder if my stress level was higher this time, what with moving and all.

lots of fluids and no heavy exercise for a couple of weeks until my poor ovaries get back to their normal size.

don't have much else to report -- i'm feeling just about settled into our fabulous new apartment. if i feel up to it this weekend i'm going to do the last of the unpacking and reorganize a few things... wow my life is super-exciting.

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[info]platypuslord
2008-07-12 12:14 am UTC (link)
Recently I've been seeing a lot of posters for a talk claiming that ARGH EGG DONATION IS EXPLOITING WOMEN. Their presentation is annoyingly feminist, but they managed to irritate me into researching the issue myself. Browsing the web suggests that there's a great deal of demand and not very much oversight... It also suggests women are paid roughly 8K$, and that maybe not everyone is getting told about something called OHSS, and this may or may not be a problem.

Anyway, I did a bunch of websurfing on the topic yesterday, and now today I am seeing reports from someone who does it firsthand, so I am wondering what you think.

Edited at 2008-07-12 12:15 am UTC

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 02:37 am UTC (link)
i do not at all believe it is exploitative, though there have certainly been questionable cases (such as the Yale advertisement offering something like $50k for a donor who met very specific requirements). i think it's also significantly different for me because i went through a clinic (the fertility clinic associated with Columbia University) directly, and not through an "egg broker", which is a company that basically connects donors with clinics/recipients. i think that much of the potential for abuse may be due to these brokers.

i was paid $8k for both of my donations (it's apparently the going rate for the area). i know that sounds like a lot, but having been through it, i know i would not have done it for free, and i probably wouldn't have done it for much less. it's basically two months of disrupting your schedule, having to flood your body with all sorts of hormones, having to give yourself shots and go through numerous blood draws and ultrasound examinations (which means up in the stirrups), and ultimately putting yourself through a surgery (and although they call it a "minor" surgery, surgery is surgery) with the attendant recovery time. it's a huge stress to your system and a disruption of your life.

i did not remotely do it for the money, though i admit my reasons are somewhat selfish (of the 'wanting to keep my genes in the pool' variety). there are much easier and less physically traumatic ways to make $8K.

so in short, i guess i agree that more oversight would be a good thing, though the clinic i've worked with has been lovely. they did educate me very thoroughly about the process, including OHSS (which, btw, is fairly rare (only about 1-5% of the time will it be severe enough to be an issue, though a higher percentage of women will have a mild form, and in almost no case is it actually dangerous in the long-term) and can usually be avoided if the clinic monitors the stimulation closely (mine had ever-increasing ultrasounds, up to daily just before the surgery, and they would have cancelled the cycle if it appeared to be dangerous to me).

it is true that the compensation is much more than for a sperm donation, but i feel that adequately reflects the much higher level of pain, inconvenience, and risk that is inherent in the biological differences. i think i read that some countries (the UK?) have made it illegal to receive that compensation, but i don't know what effect, if any, that had on the number of available donors. it seems to me that it would make it even harder to find donors, since someone would have to feel very strongly about this in order to put themselves through it. i don't know. certainly if it's a completely anonymous process (which both of mine were), it's nice to walk away from it with something, since you'll never know whether you actually helped bring a child into the world. in and of itself that not-knowing is kind of a letdown, so somehow the money is a kind of closure.

that was long and highly parenthetical and i'm not sure it made a lot of sense.

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 02:44 am UTC (link)
oh, one more reason i don't see it as all that exploitative, is that most donors are 20-30 years old, and in college or college-educated... and despite the "starving college student" thing, wanting to make a few thousand to help pay off your student loans is very different from wanting to make a few thousand so you can pay your rent or buy food for your family. i don't think most donors have the degree of economic need that would make the offer of money a coercive one (except in the case of ridiculous amounts, like that $50k).

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[info]ilcylic
2008-07-12 08:06 pm UTC (link)
Offering money for something is by definition not coercion. Coercion is when there is force or the threat of force involved. Anyone can say no to any amount of money.

"I'll give you $50k for your eggs, and if you don't want to, I'll shoot you." would be coercive.

The aforementioned Yale advertisement is merely an example of supply vs: demand curves. There's a reason Stradivarius violins cost more than Chinese sweatshop violins. A.) The Stradivarius is a superior instrument, generally; and B.) There are a lot fewer of them. If you're very interested in bearing children of eggs from a supermodel beauty with 5 Ph.Ds, your donor pool (supply) is very small, and inducing someone in that pool to donate will require requisitely more money.

And frankly, I'd rather have rich people bearing children of hyperintelligent genes, rather than their own. I give you the President of the United States as exhibit A.

----

Sorry for the lecture, it just gets under my skin when people use imprecise language to talk about good things in derogatory terms. Personally, I think what you're doing is a wonderful thing. Speaking of beautiful women with advanced degrees... ;)

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-13 03:37 am UTC (link)
i'm not completely sure i agree with you. m-w lists one definition of coerce as "to compel to an act or choice", while compel is "to cause to do or occur by overwhelming pressure". i would argue that if someone is in dire financial straits and you offer them money to do something they might not otherwise do, you are on somewhat shaky ethical ground, regardless of whether you threaten force. force is merely negative compulsion, whereas reward is positive.

granted, in the end it's no one's responsibility but your own if you compromise your own morals in such a situation... which is a different question, and the reason that i'm not at all against donor compensation. but since it is also a medical procedure that puts the donors at some degree of risk, i do have to agree that there should be more oversight/regulation.

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[info]platypuslord
2008-07-12 03:31 am UTC (link)
some countries have made it illegal to receive that compensation

reminds me of a quote from that news article: "Donors are mostly U.S. women because most industrialized nations ban paid donation, Spar says. Canada joined a list of countries whose residents — dubbed reproduction tourists — now flock to the USA for eggs."

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 01:36 pm UTC (link)
which sort of confirms my intuition that most women wouldn't be willing to go through this for free. i feel like, at that point, you'd have to be doing it for a friend, or because you know someone who went through infertility treatment.

now, there's sort of a deeper moral question here, which is whether there should be thousands of dollars going into making it possible for infertile couples to have children while there are so many already-born children needing to be adopted. i'm not nearly informed enough about either issue to tackle that one, though.

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 01:45 pm UTC (link)
oh, interesting. i just clicked on your links. that "hands off" one is talking about egg donation for research purposes, NOT for infertility. which basically means that the eggs are used to do stem cell research and research into cloning, instead of being fertilized and implanted into a woman who is trying to have a child. not only is that a very different situation from the perspective of the donor (i think i would be a lot less comfortable with the research donation), it's very different in terms of compensation, as the researchers, unlike potential egg recipients, would not have any reason to favor well-educated women. so there's certainly potential for coercion there.

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[info]platypuslord
2008-07-12 04:46 pm UTC (link)
Whoops. Thanks for catching that.

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[info]elegantelbow
2008-07-12 12:18 am UTC (link)
Somehow I had absolutely no idea you were doing this. I hope it's making you fabulously wealthy

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 02:40 am UTC (link)
it isn't particularly, but that isn't the point. believe me, there are much easier ways to make a buck. :)

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[info]elegantelbow
2008-07-12 06:14 am UTC (link)
Interesting. What's motivating you to do this, then? Is it for a friend?

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 01:32 pm UTC (link)
no, it's completely anonymous. i guess it's a combination of altruism and a selfish desire to keep my genes in the pool... i don't know if i will ever be at a point in my life where i'll want children of my own, so it seems somehow right to even the scales, and give that opportunity to a woman who wants to get pregnant and can't.

though having children is not one of my life goals, i think if it doesn't happen, i will feel some slight regret. the potential existence of a child of mine, somewhere in the world, will help ameliorate that regret.

also, it may be sort of a karmic banking... as in, if it happens at all, it seems more and more likely that i will be well into my 30s before i decide to have children. so i may well need someone else to do this for me. (although at that point i might just adopt, but that is an entirely different can of worms.)

to be fair, the money is a factor; the whole process is too physically traumatic for me to be willing to do it for free, even though all the reasons above would still hold.

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[info]damion
2008-07-12 07:23 am UTC (link)
Interestingly, when I last saw you I thought you looked different. Perhaps it was the hormones!

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-12 01:37 pm UTC (link)
that is interesting! different how?

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[info]damion
2008-07-15 08:15 pm UTC (link)
Not really sure. Memory fades, and mine more than most :D

Different body shape I think, though that could be a result of basically just sitting in the muffin-chair the entire time and looking at you from a lower perspective than usual.

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[info]ilcylic
2008-07-12 08:08 pm UTC (link)
Out of curiousity, how often could you do this, theoretically? One donation every 3 months? 2 months? 6?

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-13 03:52 am UTC (link)
you have to "rest" a minimum of one cycle between, so probably 1 every 3 months.

however, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine sets a lifetime upper limit of six, since (a) it could be detrimental to your health and/or long-term fertility, and (b) they don't want too high odds of half-siblings meeting and marrying. many clinics set the limit at 3-4, and i think states might have different laws, too.

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[info]_fiat_lux_
2008-07-15 01:53 am UTC (link)
Meh. It's only a matter of time before the insurance companies succeed in requiring genetic testing for every potential thing, so people will find out soon enough whether their potential mate is a sneak sibling.

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inbreeding and attraction
[info]gustavolacerda
2008-07-16 09:34 am UTC (link)
Sibling relations (for the purposes of getting the yuck!-inbreeding-reaction) seem to be learned: unrelated children raised together will not marry each other, which has been a problem for kibbutzim.
In fact, I think people tend to be attracted to those who look like kin (women especially when are least fertile). I wonder whether/how inbreeding was prevented in societies where siblings didn't know they were siblings.

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[info]soopahgrover
2008-07-16 03:45 am UTC (link)
Hey you! *hugs* Glad to hear it was easier for you this time around.

Someone in [info]real_women was asking about egg donation yesterday. In particular, she was interested in others' personal experiences. Do you mind if I point her to your entries? I see that they're public, still it feels best to check with you first before I direct strangers to your personal journal. ^_^

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[info]_wirehead_
2008-07-16 05:21 am UTC (link)
by all means! that is why they are public. :)

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