The News
White egg donors are paid up to eight times more than Black donors in the US, according to a new book, Eggonomics, which explores racism and inequality in the egg donation industry.
Author Diane Tober, a professor at the University of Alabama, interviewed hundreds of people in the US who donated their eggs for use in infertility treatments and found vast racial disparities in their compensation.
White women received up to $100,000 per donation, while the highest payment to a Black donor was only $12,000, Tober found. She also found that 78% of the 719 donors studied were white, whereas 11% were Black or Hispanic.
While paying for donated eggs is illegal in many countries, the US sets no limits on compensation, with individual fertility agencies, clinics, or egg banks typically setting their own prices.
Fertility agencies and egg banks often tout “desired social and physical traits” in marketing to would-be parents, Tober’s study found. This has helped foster an industry that plays on racist ideas about the “perfect donor,” she wrote.
SIGNALS
Racialized hierarchies shape donor compensation
Black people searching for donors often found that there were few available with African ancestry, according to the research. This may be because people of color were less likely to consider donating as they were offered lower pay than white and East Asian donors, who were often marketed as “elite” and were highly compensated, Tober found. Both Black donors and recipients were also subject to harmful industry stereotypes: One Black would-be donor was told by a clinic that she wouldn’t be matched unless she donated anonymously, because “Black people don’t really want open donations.”
Egg donation industry has long been criticized for being eugenicist
Questions of eugenics have long swirled around the egg donation industry: Intended parents are “trying to imagine their child” when they assess a donor’s so-called “credentials,” a would-be donor who was asked for photos and SAT scores wrote in The Atlantic in 2002. While the US allows for compensation, it raises questions about what precisely they are being compensated for. Fertility agencies, which often market themselves as accepting only a small proportion of egg donor applicants, are a large part of the problem: “The clinic was not just assessing my predisposition for genetic disorders… Over screening calls, team members would subtly compliment and affirm descriptions of my body, personality, and Ivy League education,” another donor noted in The Guardian.
The US is an international hotspot for donors — and would-be buyers
With one in six people experiencing infertility globally, egg donation is a booming industry, worth $3 billion in 2022 — and the US is a key hotspot. Prospective parents from countries where buying donated eggs is illegal, including China, Germany, and Switzerland, often turn to US donors looking for children of the same ethnicity as themselves. The most expensive donor Tober interviewed was paid more than $250,000, which the researcher said was likely because she was Chinese-American and had a master’s degree from MIT. The lucrative sums have fueled the US’ large pool of donors, Wired noted, leading to criticism by Tober and others that the industry takes advantage of young women living in financial precarity.