Price and Prejudice: How Ads for Egg Donation are Starting to Sound like Matrimonials
By Ipsita Chakravarty,
Scroll.in
| 08. 02. 2015
[India]
The advertisement was seeking a woman with a “high intelligence quotient, fair or wheatish complexion, between 22-26 yrs. Preferably B +ve”.
It might have added convent-educated, very good-natured and specified a caste. But this was no matrimonial notice. Placed by an organisation called Surrogacy India, it was looking for egg donors who would meet that description. It went on said egg donors would be “duly rewarded”.
The prejudices that prevail in practices such as marriage seem to have been transferred to the process of birth itself, with people openly asking for traits that they think will produce the kind of babies they want. It's a kind of a Shaadi.com for embryos.
Except that it’s more complicated than that. The practice of egg donation, especially when done commercially, has thrown up a range of tricky ethical questions over the years. India, which has seen an assisted reproduction boom in recent years, was blissfully oblivious to these questions. These procedures were lucrative businesses with no regulations or standards. But with drafting of the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (Regulation) Bill, 2013, the conversation...
Related Articles
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 08.19.2025
Human eggs are incredibly rare cells. The ovary typically produces only 400 mature eggs across a woman’s life. But biologists in George Church’s lab at Harvard University — a group that’s never content with nature’s limits — just got a...
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 Harry Hunter, PET BioNews | 08.11.2025
The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has announced plans to publish a POSTnote and called for submissions on surrogacy law in the UK and internationally.
The current UK surrogacy laws, largely based on legislation from the 1980s, have been...
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...