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Last week, I heard a panel of women speak in a Lower East Side bar. They each had three things in common: They were magazine-cover gorgeous, had enough combined graduate degrees to create a new department at M.I.T., and every one of them had sold her eggs.

The evening's objective was simple: Discuss egg selling. So, for the first 40 minutes, each panelist offered witty, clinical, and articulate breakdowns of her experience, from the initial process of applying with an agency to "bartering" with couples on price to the rigid schedule of self-injected hormones. They ran us through the logistics (donors are offered up to potential buyers in a catalog that includes pictures, SAT scores, and academic degrees), the fuzzy legal issues (in the U.S. it's illegal to "sell" eggs, so the handover is labeled a "donation" followed by a sizable monetary compensation for your "time and energy"), and the lexicon (anonymous donors are often referred to by a number, while the purchasers are called "IM" or "Intended Mother").

But when it came to the messy internal aspects -- whether...