Surrogacy and eggsploitation

Surrogacy has become big business and women in poor countries are being exploited in the process as is evident in recent reports from India surrounding the issue of egg donation, which has also been termed eggsploitation.

Women’s e-news reports that two women have died from causes tied to their role as egg donors in India's booming market for artificial reproduction.

Fertility centers in India (and elsewhere) are clever in their approach and openly invite women in the age group of 25-30 to join them in ‘helping childless couples’. The process is also promoted as an easy way of generating income for women. Neither the morality, nor the possible consequences involved are highlighted to prospective egg donors.

You’ve probably seen them—most of us have. Ads soliciting women to donate their eggs for in vitro fertilization are everywhere: in newspapers, on the Internet, on college campus bulletin boards.

 The procedure is far more problematic than those upbeat ads would ever lead one to believe. The women involved are given hormones to force their bodies to produce far more eggs than they normally would—and that, as you might expect, leads to consequences.

The consequences include strokes, brain damage, internal bleeding, or infertility after the procedure. Some women ended up with cancer, even those who had no family history of the disease. Others nearly died from complications of the surgery done to retrieve the eggs and sadly some also die from hyper-stimulation of the ovaries.

But the problems go beyond that. The women involved in egg donation are being exploited they are being turned into human commodities. They are providing genetic material for their own biological children, whom they may never have a chance to know. If they express any concerns or reservations, they are pressured and even guilt-tripped into continuing.

Young women are often unaware of the risks of egg donation, donors have to take drugs to stimulate egg production, and complications as we have set out may cause future infertility or even death in rare cases.

Women are usually told that egg donation is a safe procedure, when the reality is decidedly unsafe. No young woman should be used in a procedure that jeopardizes her own fertility -- indeed her own life -- in order to line the pockets of those who promote the infertility industry's human egg trade.

The disastrous implications of the practice are set out in a video and can be found on the "Eggsploitation" website

Sex selection abortion in India

A new study published in the Lancet on Tuesday estimates that sex selective abortion of baby girls in India has led to 7.1 million fewer girls than boys up to age six. It also says that the gender gap that has widened by more than a million in a decade (according to an AFP report)

The study reveals that many Indian families, in which the first child is a girl, arrange for prenatal ultrasound testing with a view to establishing the sex of their babies and will abort a second female in the hope that a subsequent pregnancy will yield a boy.

In the study, researchers led by Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto, analysed census data from 2011 and earlier.

They also examined over 250,000 births from national surveys to calculate the difference in the girl-boy ratio for second births in families in which the first-born child had been a girl.

They found that this ratio fell from 906 girls per 1,000 boys in 1990 to 836 girls per 1,000 boys in 2005, an annual decline of a half of a percent.

Declines were much greater in mothers who had gone to school for at least ten years than in mothers with no education at all. The same trend held true for wealthier households compared to poorer ones.

The increasingly lopsided ratio of girls to boys however is larger in wealthy households than poorer ones, the researchers reported.

Between 1980 and 2010, they estimate, up to 12 million girls may have been aborted because of their sex.

Well done to Fiorella Nash in highlighting the human tragedy associated with this barbaric practice in her BLOG

70-year-old gives birth

A woman old enough to be a great-grandmother has given birth to a baby girl after conceiving through IVF and become the world's oldest mother. Rajo Devi, from the Haryan province of India, is apparently not worried about what will happen to the child when she and her 72-year-old husband die - almost certainly before the child reaches adulthood. They have an extended family who will look after her.

This may be the case, but there is no getting round the fact that two elderly people have deliberately created and brought into the world a child neither of them will be able to love and support into adult life.

The newspaper report is entirely positive, with the doctor who performed the ICSI procedure, a Dr Anurag Bishnoi, talking excitedly about how IVF has revolutionised the way we see fertility. It certainly has. It has turned children into goods to be created or discarded and allowed adults to indulge their selfish and unethical desires. We have nothing to be proud of.