SEVERAL THOUSAND MEN visited Ron Harris’s Web site the other day and paid $ 24.95 each for the privilege of bidding in an auction for the eggs of beautiful models. These men may have fallen for a highly profitable publicity stunt launched by a well-known pornographer, but what Harris proposed to do — sell human eggs — is perfectly legal. In fact, his venture is only the most recent instance of commerce in human eggs to make the news. A few months ago, an anonymous couple offered $ 50,000 to a donor who was five-foot-ten, athletic, and had an SAT score of at least 1,400. Another couple was willing to pay the same sum to a donor three inches shorter and with 100 fewer SAT points.
“The great egg hunt,” as one Seattle reporter dubbed it, has elicited criticism from infertility organizations, which typically pay donors on the order of $ 2,000-$ 5,000. The clinics are careful to call this compensation for the donor’s time and discomfort, not payment for the egg. Representatives of these organizations worry that the bidding wars might reflect unfavorably on them and cause Americans to question the morality of egg donation.
Usually when Americans develop moral qualms about some practice or policy related to reproduction, intellectuals are quick to look to our transatlantic and Canadian neighbors to show us how backward we are. But this time they have come up empty-handed. No European country, it turns out, allows the buying and selling of human eggs, and most forbid even their donation.
There are a number of possible explanations for the greater conservatism of European policy on this issue. Perhaps the events of the 20th century have made Europeans particularly wary of practices that could be perceived as eugenic. But Dolly the sheep was genetically engineered in Scotland, and similar experiments have been conducted elsewhere in Europe. We Americans, moreover, are selectively wary of genetic manipulation. Thus, the Clinton administration recently imposed a (temporary) ban on human cloning. While many European countries are trying to restrict genetically engineered vegetables and the like, this has more to do with protecting small farmers than with any fear that the techniques used to grow redder tomatoes will eventually be used to improve the human race.
A second possible reason for European restrictions on egg selling is distaste for American-style capitalism. Recent protests against McDonald’s restaurants invading the Continent remind us that Europeans are not uniformly enthusiastic about cheap, generic fried food. In Canada, which has restrictions similar to those in Europe on egg donation, officials denounce the selling of eggs for profit. “We don’t want billboards saying ‘Womb for rent,'” Patricia Baird, former chairman of Canada’s Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, told the Orange County Register in May 1995. But even an aversion to the cash nexus would not explain why many European countries are banning the transfer of eggs when no money is exchanged.
Perhaps it is time Americans entertain a third possibility — that our European neighbors are not so liberal on the social issues of the day as our intellectual elite would have us believe. Although Europeans and Canadians may mock our impeachment hearings as prudish, they have their own moral scruples.
Consider abortion. While public opinion in both Europe and America is relatively conservative on abortion, the laws in the two places are quite different. As Mary Ann Glendon, a professor at Harvard Law School, documented in Abortion and Divorce in Western Law, European statutes, although permitting certain abortions, tend to acknowledge a developing fetus at any stage as a form of life to be respected. Even today, 12 years after that book was published, Glendon observes, “We haven’t really looked carefully at Europe. If we had, we would see that they have worked out approaches to [social issues] that are more attentive to what is going on in their society.”
Glendon cites several laws to support this point. In France, first-trimester abortions are available to women “in distress” (though no sanction is imposed on those who obtain abortions without proving distress). European countries often require seven-day waiting periods. Most require that a doctor fully explain to the woman all of her options, including adoption and any day care to which she would be entitled should she keep the child. In France, this consultation is to be performed “with a view toward enabling her to keep her child.”
Glendon argues that because European law is based on the “Rousseauean” principle that “no one owns his or her own body,” Europe and Canada regulate abortion and fertility technologies much more strictly than the United States. Thus, in contrast with the United States, where late-term abortion is legal everywhere and as many as a few hundred partial-birth abortions are performed every year, some European countries have recently tightened their regulations, reducing by a number of weeks the period during which a woman can have an abortion without certifying that her own life is in danger. The principle that individuals do not have absolute title to themselves is so firmly established, according to Glendon, that France had to pass a special enactment to allow blood transfusions. This is a far cry from the pro-choice mantra that a woman has the right to do whatever she chooses with her own body.
Many of the same issues are at stake in the egg donation debate. Canadian Patricia Baird warns, “These [fertility technologies] have the potential to turn children into a commodity; to commercialize them, and that diminishes human dignity.” Europeans and Canadians who see human dignity at stake both when fetuses are aborted and when human eggs are sold bring a more morally coherent outlook to bear on decisions in areas like genetic engineering.
In America, moral confusion is compounded by legalism. In the surrogacy case of Kass v. Kass, for example, a New York man is trying to prevent his ex-wife from having implanted in her womb an egg he fertilized before their divorce. This case has already made its way to television in a bizarre episode of Law & Order. In a debate last year on National Public Radio, host Ray Suarez asked a panel of experts about the Kass case: “Is it clear in any legal sense . . . whether those eggs — those pre-zygotes — represent joint property? Individual property? Property to be disposed of at the end of the marriage?”
The morally serious answer may be “none of the above.” But neither Suarez nor his panelists seemed willing to consider that possibility. While some Americans express reservations about egg donation, these tend to take the form of questions about distribution: Should rich people be able to buy better genetic material than poor people? What if poor women decide to take advantage of lucrative offers: Will this amount to harvesting the eggs of the disadvantaged for profit? Seldom raised is the question of the intrinsic value of the genetic material itself.
Americans have been told that we lag behind sophisticated Europe on issues relating to sex. Instead, Glendon concludes, “when the Supreme Court established a new American abortion policy in 1973, it did so in a way which put the United States in a class by itself.” The Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade gave the United States at a stroke the most radical abortion regime in the industrialized world. Media stereotypes may represent Europeans as having advanced farther towards enshrining the principle of sovereignty over one’s body than we have, but this isn’t so. It appears we Americans, like Gigi, “don’t understand the Parisians.” It’s high time we tried.
