An Ova Donor on the Mess in Missouri

[Universe Prince]

Kerry Howley, about a year ago, sold some of her ova. The only reason I know this is because she spoke about it in a good article, "Ova for Sale",  on the issue of a market for human eggs. Anyway, here is what she had to say about the anti-stem cell research commercial featuring Jim Caviezel, Patricia Heaton and some baseball player guy.

I don't pitch for the Cardinals or play Ray Romano's wife on TV, and I haven't even seen Passion of the Christ, so I really have no business commenting on the Missouri cloning kerfuffle. But I did just sell some eggs, so I'm going to go ahead and take issue with Patricia Heaton's Handmaid's Tale-esque take on egg retrieval:                               Amendment 2 actually makes it a constitutional right for fertility clinics to pay women for eggs. Low-income women will be seduced by big checks and extracting donor eggs is an extremely complicated, dangerous, and painful procedure.                               I don't recall being seduced into doing anything (though that sounds kind of fun), but I guess it's those "low-income" ladies who lose all autonomy at the sight of easy cash. It's helpful to remember that this is the same routine procedure tens of thousands of women go through every year in fertility clinics. (Most will have their own eggs reimplanted.) It takes twenty minutes. You can offer up some ova in the morning and go to work in the afternoon. As for dangerous, all procedures involving general anaesthesia present a degree of risk, but no one has ever dropped dead from an egg harvest. And painful? I guess it would be pretty damn painful if they forgot to put you under. Hands Off Our Ovaries, praised to high heaven by National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez here, is calling for a moratorium on egg extraction for research purposes "because losing even one woman's life is too high a price to pay." (You could say the same about permitting women to leave their kitchens -- it's dangerous out there.) But if egg retrieval is so perilous and coercive -- if the procedure is the problem -- it makes no sense to ban extraction specifically for scientific purposes. Are they opposed to the harvest or the research?

I think that is a very good question.

[Plane]

    The safety or cash value of egg extraction is a weak issue , the real offence is the creation and destruction of human beings for spare parts .

    But we do not all agree that a Zygote can be a human being , so there is this reaching around for other problems.