Egg Donation & Fertility Treatment – Wake up!  We need to act now before patients’ fertility treatment options are further minimized:

1. Oklahoma – Cash for eggs banned in Oklahoma. 

“A measure passed Thursday by the state House, intended to make it illegal for a woman to sell her eggs, could jeopardize state fertility clinics, doctors at two Oklahoma City facilities said Thursday.

House Bill 3077 easily won House approval, passing 85-8. It now goes to the Senate.

“We are endangering our young women’s lives,” said Rep. Rebecca Hamilton, D-Oklahoma City, the bill’s author. “These girls are being injured. They are dying.”

Low-income women and college students are especially vulnerable to enticements to undergo the procedure Hamilton described as complicated, dangerous and painful, including prodding and surgery.

Women are paid and sometimes given hormones to ensure they produce more than the routine monthly number of eggs.

HB 3077 does not regulate or prohibit the procurement of eggs for the treatment of infertility being experienced by the woman from whom the eggs are being taken. Women would be allowed to donate, they just can’t sell them, Hamilton said.

A facility in Dallas often runs ads in college newspapers offering payments of between $5,000 and $45,000 to harvest women’s eggs, she said.

“What this (HB 3077) does, it stops the payment for women donating their eggs,” she said.

The practice is similar to prostitution, Hamilton said, and it turns doctors into predators.

Loss of license

If passed, the bill would not punish the woman who sells her eggs. Instead, it would result in the permanent revocation of a doctor’s license. Hamilton said fertility clinics in the state, if her measure becomes law, “could use donor eggs all they want; they just can’t go out and solicit women with money.”

Dr. Eli Reshef, medical director of the Henry G. Bennett Jr. Fertility Institute at Integris Health Center, said a ban on compensation in England “dried up the well of egg donation” and that would happen here as well.

“It’s a typical case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he said. “That bill is nothing short of ignorant and asinine. If it passes, women will be denied an essential service.”

About $4,000 is paid to donors as compensation, he said. They are counseled and sign consent forms that outline all medical risks.

“The danger is less than driving a car on the highway,” he said. “Women are fully informed about what they go through ahead of time.”

He said the center provides compensation to between 15 and 20 egg donors each year.

Agencies participate

Dr. Karl Hansen, section chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at OU Physicians Reproductive Health, said the center doesn’t directly compensate donors. Payment comes from egg recipients and is made through third-party donor agencies that are located out of state.

If HB 3077 becomes law, it would end egg donation that has had a huge role in helping infertile Oklahoma families, he said.

“It would effectively stop these procedures altogether,” Hansen said.

The donor is not “selling her eggs” but being compensated because the process takes several weeks and involves multiple medical visits, he said. “We are in an area of medicine that we feel promotes family building, which I think would be something that would be supported.”

About 65 donors went through the process last year at his center, he said. Risks are minimal, mostly being a small chance of bleeding or infection at the surgical site, he said.

Tamya Cox, legislative counsel for the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the group opposes the measure. The woman owns her eggs, not the state government.

“This is just continued government interference,” she said.

Rep. Ryan Kiesel was unsuccessful in trying to get an amendment to the bill that would prohibit men from selling sperm.

The bill is unconstitutional because it just targets women, said Kiesel, D-Seminole.”

2. Michigan – A Michigan Senate Committee approved six Bills containing unconscionable intrusions into the medical care provided to infertility patients.  According to Resolve:

“RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association has learned of a series of bills — Senate Bill Nos. 647, 648, 649, 650, 651, and 652 and House Bill Nos. 5131, 5132, 5133, 5134, 5130, and 5129 (the “Bills”) – pending in the Michigan state legislature that threaten the interests of infertility patients.  The Senate Bills are up for immediate hearing, and we urge residents of Michigan to let the legislators know that they oppose these Bills.

While the Bills purport to regulate stem cell research, they actually go much further:  they mandate vast, new Governmental surveillance of infertility patients and their treatment.  Under these bills, the Government would collect and publicize intimate information about infertility patients.  The Bills would unreasonably burden the treating physicians and would certainly raise the cost of medical treatments to have a baby.  They would also add so many conditions that few people could exercise their choice to donate surplus embryos to research.  For these reasons, RESOLVE opposes these Bills and urges that they be rejected.

The Bills were not drafted for the protection of infertility patients or doctors, but rather for the purpose of interfering with infertility treatment — even if the price is that many couples in Michigan will be denied the chance to have a family.

Senate Bill 649 may look on its face like mere informed consent and monitoring, but it actually goes much further:  it authorizes the Government to collect and publicize private information about infertility patients and their embryos. 

With SB 649, the Government of Michigan might as well be right in the examining room with the patient.  It snoops into the intimate details of a patient’s treatments to have a baby in a way that is unprecedented in this country.  This Bill would insert the Government at every step in patients’ private medical treatment, including –

 Governmental tracking of every egg and embryo at every clinic
 Reporting to the Government if a woman has a miscarriage
 Reporting to the Government how a couple decides to handle their unused embryos (e.g., whether they donate them to research)

ACT NOW!