Supply And Demand
I was paging through The Daily Bruin, UCLA's newspaper (don't ask why), and couldn't help but notice a huge ad seeking an egg donor. They wanted the woman to be very attractive, very tall, very intelligent and (very?) white. Oh yeah, and under 30.
How much did they offer? $80,000 plus expenses. Not bad.
It made me think back to my days in college and law school, where I knew a number of such women. If these offers had been around back then, I imagine some would have left academia and churned out product while they were still young enough. (I wonder if I could have gotten a finder's fee.)
I checked but couldn't find any similar offers for sperm.
Columbus Guy says: Necessary joke, but of course the economics is entirely different. In the one case there is an extraction cost, and $80,000 seems reasonable, since, given most of the women I've dated, it's quite a battle to get to the thing. In the other case it's a containment cost, and given the size of the diovorce industry, I'd say it takes even more than $80,000 to keep it in.
posted by LAGuy @ 1:38 AM
4 Comments:
It's about scarcity. Sperm outnumbers eggs about a ten million to one, which makes each sperm worth less than a yen.
The first generation of children conceived from sperm donors are now teenagers and young adults, and I wish the MSM would pay more attention to their stories.
Here's the first entry on a blog run by a girl with no father: . I don't know about you, but I find this heartbreaking. Unlike adopted kids, who know they have a father somewhere, and orphans, who know they once had a father who is now dead, this girl doesn't have a father at all. At least, not in any sense that makes sense. Her biology comes from some guy who squirted into a cup in some waiting room, with no idea if his sperm would be used soon, eventually, or never.
Oops! Here's the the link.
And from another article on this topic:
Adopted children know that their biological parents, for whatever reason, could not or would not raise them. That knowledge is painful. At the same time, they also know that the parents who adopted them saved them from the terrible fate of having no family. They feel gratitude to their adoptive parents and love them as any child loves the parents who raised him.
By contrast, donor-conceived children know that the parents raising them are also the ones who intentionally created them with a severed relationship to at least one of their biological parents. The pain they feel was caused not by some distant, shadowy person who gave them up, but by the parent who cares for them.
.... [Some young adults conceived by donors] tell me that their early attempts to make sense of their origins were made more painful by the people around them who insisted that it shouldn't matter. That they should be glad to be alive. That they shouldn't torment the parents who raised them. That they are silly and deluded for thinking that some guy who went into a little room with a dirty magazine holds a key to their identity.
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