Ivy women wooed to help infertile couples

Calling all Ivy League females. These days, advertisements for egg donors not only request specific age, height and eye color requirements -- they also seek out a particular gene pool: those with high SAT scores, GPAs and IQs. While advertising in newspapers for egg donors may not be a new approach for infertile couples, placing ads in Ivy League school newspapers is an entirely new trend. OPTIONS, a company which has recently been placing daily ads in almost every Ivy League student newspaper, recruits and screens egg donors for prospective recipients. "[Potential recipients] are hoping to find a donor that will somehow reflect what they would have offered the child had they used their own genetics," OPTIONS Director Teri Royal said. And couples are willing to pay a huge sum in their pursuit of the "smart" ova. Normally, compensation for egg donation ranges from $1,500 to $5,000 in the northeast part of the country, according to Obstetrics and Gynecology Professor Christos Coutifaris, director of human reproduction for the Penn Health System. But the ads placed in Ivy League newspapers promise compensation as high as $25,000, plus expenses. Although there may not be any guarantee that an Ivy League egg donor will produce an "Ivy League baby," many Ivy League students say they have certainly seen the increase of advertisements -- with intellectual prerequisites -- in their newspapers. Harvard Crimson Business Editor Chris Lange said, "We have one [of these ads] running almost every day this month? most specifying SAT scores," adding that 16 adds will be running in the Crimson's 20 issues this month. And sophomore Salil Gupte, acting managing editor of The Cornell Daily Sun, said she has also seen "a definite increase in [egg donor ads] this year compared to last." For infertile couples, the opportunity to produce and nurture their own child raises ethical questions, according to Coutifaris, who said he believes that "shopping" for eggs at Ivy League schools "is extreme with profound ethical issues." "Twenty-thousand dollars just seems outrageous," he added, comparing the recent advertisements to a sperm bank in California which featured sperm and eggs from Nobel laureates several years ago. But even with the high asking prices of Ivy eggs, the response rate at the Ivies has been extremely low, Royal said. "The response rate at Ivies [to egg donor ads] is at least 75 percent lower compared to general public colleges or universities," she said. Since most of the students attending Ivy League universities come from families with at least "minimal wealth," Royal explained, students are not as tempted by the profits of egg donations. Or perhaps the case is, as College and Engineering sophomore Veronica Lemcoff said, "[Egg donating] is a type of manipulation and it gives me the creeps."

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