- "....The
multibillion-dollar fertility industry is booming, and experimenting
with business models that are changing the American family in new and
unpredictable ways. Would-be parents seeking donor eggs and sperm can
pick and choose from long checklists of physical and intellectual
characteristics. Clinics now offer volume discounts, package deals and
100 percent guarantees for babymaking....
"According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 12 percent of American women 15 to 55 — 7.3 million — have used some sort of fertility service; the use of assisted reproductive technologies has doubled in the past decade. In 2015, these procedures resulted in nearly 73,000 babies — 1.6 percent of all U.S. births. The rate is even higher in some countries, including Japan (5 percent) and Denmark (10 percent)....
"The donor-egg industry, in particular, has taken off in the past decade....The number of attempted pregnancies with donor eggs has soared from 1,800 in 1992 to almost 21,200 in 2015.
"Yet in the United States, the industry remains largely self-regulated. Questions abound about the recruitment of donors; the ethics of screening and selecting embryos for physical characteristics; the ownership of the estimated millions of unused eggs, sperm samples and embryos in long-term storage; and the emerging ability to tinker with embryos via the gene-editing tool CRISPR.
"Earlier this year, a group of donor-conceived adults documented numerous ethical lapses in the industry, including donors who lied to prospective parents about their health histories and other qualifications, and clinics that claimed to have limited donations from some individuals — while permitting those individuals to submit hundreds of samples. They called on the Food and Drug Administration to provide more oversight of the 'cryobanks' that gather, store and sell the most precious commodities in the industry — sperm and eggs.
The agency said it is reviewing the matter, but cannot predict when it will have a response 'due to the existence of other FDA priorities'....
"the California IVF Fertility Center is pioneering what some refer to as the 'Costco model' of babymaking, creating batches of embryos using donor eggs and sperm that can be shared among several different families.
That model has served to highlight a preference among many would-be parents for tall, thin, highly-educated donors....
"Prospective parents can filter and sort potential donors by race and ethnic background, hair and eye color, and education level. They also can get much more personal information: audio of the donor’s voice, photos of the donor as a child and as an adult, and written responses to questions that read like college-application essays....
"A prescreened vial of sperm sells for as little as $400 and can be shipped via FedEx. A set of donor eggs — as many as 30, depending on the donor — can cost $10,000 or more to compensate for the risky and invasive medical procedure required to harvest eggs from the donor’s ovaries.
"Fertility companies freely admit that specimens from attractive donors go fast, but it’s intelligence that drives the pricing: Many companies charge more for donors with a graduate degree.
"Talent sells, too....
"When the time is right, ...[one woman] will explain [to the children] that they are 'high-tech babies' and impress on them the importance of memorizing their donor number, in case they happen to 'run into another donor-egg kid.'
“'I know it’s a really slim chance,' she said. 'But I want them to be aware, just in case'” (Washington Post, 10/21/17).
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