What are the risks of egg harvesting and donation?
Jennifer Dahl, MA, BSN, RN, discusses the risks of egg harvesting and the reason why many people do it.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Egg donation, which in the United States, predominantly is egg selling-- most women are being compensated. And you can look at the college newspapers and Facebook
and the ads offering them, 10, 50, $100,000. I've seen ads as high as that. And the risks are real.
I mean, young women take drugs. They get these drugs, and oftentimes they just come in the mail. They mix and draw up these injections at home.
And they take injections. The first series of injections causes a medical menopause, which suppresses the ovarian function
and puts the woman into a medically induced menopause. Then she's switched to different fertility drugs in order to super ovulate her and get her ovaries, which
would normally produce one egg per month, to produce as many as 10, 15. Several of the women I've interviewed for my film,
"Exploitation," got 30-- from one-- eggs per month, 60 from another woman.
And then they undergo a surgical procedure which has risks, the risk of anesthesia there, the risks of the procedure. And the actual procedure, which is usually
done vaginally, to puncture the ovaries and then resection them, to suck out the eggs-- so at every step,
these drugs have risks. The procedure has risks. One of the most prevalent common risks that we've seen in egg donation is ovarian hyperstimulation
syndrome. Because these women have been so aggressively stimulated, they developed this syndrome, which is life-threatening in rare instances.
But it does carry the risk of even death. And it's tangled up with the fact that a lot of these women need the money.
The first thing that catches their eye is this ad that's offering them a large sum of money to come in and donate their eggs.
And they will often assume risk because they need the money. They need to pay their graduate school tuition. They need to pay their rent.
womens health
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