Afew weeks ago, a 19-year-old influencer announced a new hobby to scores of TikTok followers: egg donation. Selling her eggs to women or couples looking to get pregnant was a fast and mostly painless way to make gobs of money, she thought.

“This girl just said she donated her eggs and got a quick $20,000—and I immediately started looking it up and decided that’s going to be my next hobby,” TikToker Gigi Juliana, holding a Starbucks iced coffee, told her audience of 137,000. She claimed the side effects from the invasive surgical procedure are no different than what she already feels after a trip to the med spa (where customers go for botox and filler), so why not? “If you see like 30,000 of my children running around because I’m going to donate eggs like crazy… don’t be alarmed,” she quipped.

Posted on August 20, the video has been watched more than 24 million times, liked 4 million times, shared hundreds of thousands of times and drawn 18,000 comments—many from others who say they, too, are eager to donate their eggs to buy that new car, fund a vacation or, like Gigi, just cash in. (Egg donors often make around $12,000 per cycle, though some can earn as much as $25,000. Repeat donors can rake in more than $70,000 for multiple rounds.)

“Basically a normal day for me…except that I will be richer…sign me up,” wrote one commenter named Lizzy.

“Imma donate my sperm cuz I’m 6”2 and highly educated with no medical problems. Gonna make BANK,” said a male follower. (Some cryobanks offer healthy men up to $1,500 a month.)

But the viral clip also prompted outcry from a vocal and growing online community of donor-conceived people—those born from donated eggs or sperm—who are increasingly using social media to push for laws to better protect kids conceived in this little-regulated space and sound the alarm on the issues that rhetoric like Gigi’s can create.

For one, mass donors can put offspring at risk of accidental incest by donating many times in the same geographic area. Unlike several other countries, the United States has no federal laws limiting the volume of donations one person can make (there are only recommendations from the nonprofit American Society of Reproductive Medicine). Having dozens or hundreds of siblings can also be traumatic for parents and children—issues highlighted in the recent Netflix documentary “Man With 1000 Kids,” about a serial sperm donor who lied his way into donating to hundreds of families around the world before a Dutch court last year barred him from ever doing so again.

There are also safety concerns and potential long-term health consequences for egg donors—especially those who donate repeatedly and therefore inject themselves with high levels of hormones over a prolonged period of time—that have not been thoroughly studied and are near impossible to explain in a seconds-long social media post, which can mislead the teens and 20-somethings who are often the target audience (Gigi was 18 when she made her viral TikTok). The American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommends egg and sperm donors to be at least 21, and that donors younger than that undergo a prior psychological evaluation.

Finally, big payouts may incentivize donors to lie or omit information on their applications, advocates argue, exploiting loopholes in a legal Wild West and lax screening processes where donors self-report any medical issues and are usually not fact-checked by the banks. (They do undergo basic genetic testing.)

“Not everything should be monetized. Not everything should be content.”

“All of these influencers—including this person—are looking at this as a money-making opportunity but not thinking about it long-term,” Laura High, one of the most-followed donor-conceived creators on TikTok, with an audience of nearly 700,000, told Forbes. “This is not an egg that's going to sit in a petri dish; this is going to become a full-fledged human being. That full-fledged human being is eventually going to see that video. And the fact that this person is treating egg donation, as they said, as a ‘hobby’ is not just dangerous, it's predatory.”

“I'm totally supportive of donor conception. … I am for ethical donor conception, and that's the problem, and that's what we're not seeing, and that's what social media is helping perpetuate: the........

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