Informed Consent for Egg Donors Won’t Exist Unless We Track Donors’ Health
By Judy E. Stern,
Our Bodies, Our Blog
| 10. 01. 2015
Both a recent article in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics and a related Ob.Gyn. News story have raised concerns about the risks of egg donation and the process of providing informed consent for donors.
Despite guidelines from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, clinical and monetary pressures can create conflicts for providers of reproductive healthcare between the needs of the egg donors and those of the couples to whom their eggs are donated — both of whom are often patients of the same providers.
The articles raise concerns that these conflicts may result in donors having an incomplete understanding of the risks and ramifications of stimulation to produce multiple eggs and retrieval of those eggs for donation.
Egg donation is a commonly used assisted reproductive technology (ART) procedure accounting for more than 12 percent of ART cycles in the United States. Conflicts can arise on several levels: donor recruitment; screening, consent and disposition decisions; ovarian stimulation; and post-stimulation monitoring.
Recruitment can involve misleading advertisements, which may not accurately convey the...
Related Articles
By Riley Beggin and Jeff Stein, The Washington Post | 08.03.2025
The White House does not plan to require health insurers to provide coverage for in vitro fertilization services, two people with knowledge of internal discussions said, even though the idea was one of President Donald Trump’s key campaign pledges.
Last...
By Sayantani DasGupta, MedPage Today | 08.05.2025
It's just a jeans ad.
It's not that deep.
It's just social media outrage.
Should physicians care about the recent American Eagle "Sydney Sweeney Has Good Genes Jeans" controversy? What, if anything, does the provocative campaign have to...
By Editors, Nature | 08.15.2025
A technology that played a key part in saving millions of lives during the COVID-19 pandemic1 should be feted to the skies. Instead, US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr announced last week that the US federal government is...
By Staff, National Women's Law Center | 08.13.2025
INTRODUCTION
Baby bonuses. Motherhood medals. Fertility tracking. You may have heard of these policy proposals as solutions from the Trump administration to help encourage women to have more children.
Besides falling short of ensuring that people have what they need...