Considering how long the cost of living has been a crisis, it’s taken a while to affect the price of one sought-after commodity: home-produced human eggs. Having been set at £750 for 13 years, the compensation limit for women who contribute their eggs is finally to rise, in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, to £986.
Not that this sum should be seen as a payment, fee or gratuity. Reporting on the increase, the BBC went out of its way to remind women that financial compensation is an incentive to niceness, nothing else: “Egg donors warned not to do it for the £986 cash”.
Maybe that’s why the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) didn’t round the money up to £990: the four quid bung might have attracted a more calculating sort of woman, one liable to wonder, shortly before her arduously cultivated eggs are harvested under anaesthetic, why the total compensation for this gruelling but inessential service wouldn’t pay for a decent iPhone.
The revised but relatively modest sum acts as a test of women’s altruism, and their collective altruism as a guarantor of the fertility industry’s purity. While more squeamish countries have, as with commercial surrogacy, prohibited egg donation, and others, like the US, encouraged a fertility free-for-all, the UK has arrived at a compromise: if young women can be convinced to supply eggs or to gestate foetuses for expenses or less, the whole sector is excused its commodifying. No women were coerced, from financial want, into the reproductive market. On the other hand, it could........