Questions for Egg Donors
Thousands of young women undergo egg retrieval procedures for other people's fertility treatment each year in the U.S. alone. But though egg retrieval is known to pose non-trivial risks, and though fertility clinics are profitable businesses, there has been almost no follow-up study of these women.
This much was acknowledged in a 2007 report by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council of the National Academies of Science:
''There are no registries that track the health of the people who have taken part in IVF, and much of what is known about the women who have participated in IVF may not be directly applicable to oocyte donors. It will be important in the coming years to accumulate extensive health data from the women whose eggs are harvested and to monitor them for long-term effects.''
Now the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), a non-profit that "advocates for the right to honesty and transparency for donor kids," has launched a survey of egg donors. Their questionnaire's 19 questions are aimed, DSR says, at getting "a better understanding of how egg donation affects women as time goes on, as we know of no medical studies or formal research on this topic." DSR hopes the results of their qualitative study will encourage "the medical community to further investigate how egg donation physically affects woman who donate."
Kudos to DSR. Thank goodness someone's trying to mind the store.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
