Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm Read Online Free PDF

unexpected finding that sperm donors are relatively difficult to recruit, yet egg donors sign up en masse. With very little advertising, OvaCorpreceives around one hundred applications a day, and Creative Beginnings receives several hundred inquiries every month. In stark contrast, CryoCorp maintains three locations in different parts of the country and employs several people whose entire job description revolves around donor recruitment. Moreover, both sperm banks pay current donors hundreds of dollars in “finder’s fees” if they refer applicants who are accepted into the program. Discussing his experience running a sperm bank, the founder of Gametes Inc. explained,
For a substantial part of our history, donor recruitment was a major concern, having an aggregate number of donors plus donor diversity. We just couldn’t keep inventory to meet the demand. Not that we were growing hugely. You’d think if you didn’t have enough inventory to meet demand, then you could name your own price and just be fabulously wealthy. Well, it didn’t work out that way.
    To increase the supply of sperm, Gametes Inc. opened offices around their small Southern town. In doing so, according to the founder, they were “taking a page from financial bankers who have branches on every corner. You’d think convenience would be a major asset. Well, most guys don’t want people knowing that they’re masturbating, so having a neighborhood branch where mom and dad can see what you’re doing isn’t really cool [ laughs ].” Over the years, the program opened offices in a nearby university town, in a large city a few hours away, in a nearby state, and in Canada. But now, it maintains just two offices: “headquarters” in the same small Southern city where the program started and a satellite office in a large city two hours away that is close to several major universities. To this day, Gametes Inc. must advertise constantly for sperm donors, and program staffers routinely remind men to send in their friends.
    It is striking that the difficulty in recruiting men does not produce an increase in their compensation and the apparent oversupply of women has not caused their fees to drop. Two popular conceptions—that most men would jump at the chance to make some extra cash by selling their sperm and that it is difficult to find women willing to undergo shots and surgery for $5,000—simply do not hold. Indeed, between 2002 and 2008, the number of profiles listed on OvaCorp’s website more than doubled.The program now has more than a thousand women available to donate, yet recipients are still informed that egg donor fees will be between $5,000 and $10,000.
    In this stage of the process, a donor’s attributes, encapsulated in the profile and extolled by staff, are used to generate income for the programs through matches, but the economic valuation of women’s eggs is more intimate than that of men’s sperm. Women are paid to produce eggs for a particular recipient who has agreed to a specific price for that donor’s sex cells. At the same time, staffers tell recipients the “donor would love to work with you,” and they inform egg donors that the recipients just “loved you and had to have you.” Thus, egg agencies structure the exchange not only as a legalistic economic transaction, but also as the beginning of a caring gift cycle, which the staff members foster by expressing appreciation to the egg donors, both on behalf of the agency and the agency’s clients.
    OvaCorp’s donor manager explained, “We have the largest donor database. The reason is we treat them like royalty. They are women, not genetics, to us. A lot of times a couple doesn’t meet them, so we want them to feel our warmth, feel the reality that we’re so grateful for what they’re doing for us as well as because they’re making our couple happy.” Likewise, CryoCorp’s marketing director notes, “We have to walk that tight-rope and make sure the [sperm] donors