Students in Nigeria are selling eggs and sperm to pay college tuition

Ethical issues surrounding the fertility industry are on full display in Nigeria, where impoverished college students are selling their eggs and sperm for cash, often so they can afford to pay their tuition.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• In Nigeria, college students are selling their eggs and sperm for cash to pay for tuition.

• The students are paid just ₦50,000 — $31 — each time they ‘donate.’

• The risks associated with donating eggs are frequently downplayed, but the unethical nature of egg and sperm donation extends beyond the effects on the donors, as children are treated like consumer products.

WHAT’S HAPPENING: 

The Daily Nigerian reported that IVF centers have quietly been using college students to supply them with eggs and sperm for couples wanting donor materials to create children via in vitro fertilization (IVF). Students are paid ₦50,000 ($31) or more, depending on the facility they work with and the characteristics they have.

One journalist, Dorothy Nwankwo, said she was concerned about the ethics of exploiting potentially vulnerable people, while Omolade Olomola — a professor in Family Law, Reproductive and Gender Justice at the Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan — said the practice is allowed to flourish due to poverty and a lack of regulations surrounding the fertility industry. Olomola gave the example of a female student taken from Lagos to Abuja to donate her eggs, which the student said was traumatizing.

“At the end of the day, she collected maybe ₦14,000, because they told her what might have been a lie – that her eggs were not viable. They didn’t tell her that it was an intrusive procedure, and she was a virgin. She said that she still had emotional and psychological trauma from that procedure,” Olomola explained, with harsh criticism leveled at the fertility industry. “All they want is to make money to survive in the immediate. What they do with them is very horrible just as people used as a baby factory. They are made to sign an undertaking, and immediately they collect their phones and lock the doors so that they lose their freedom. They bombard them with various injections until the procedure is done. I am not against people selling their eggs or sperm but if it must be done, it must be properly done.”

One doctor, Bukumi Kolade, also spoke out against these practices, even as someone who is an expert in IVF. “As long as we have people who need eggs, we will have people who are commercial egg donors, but the young ladies should be made to understand the risks involved in what they are doing,” he said. “It should not be seen as a means of livelihood.”

Can You Be Pro-Life And Support IVF?

The risks associated with donating eggs are frequently downplayed, even as the fertility industry across the globe seeks out more women to serve as donors.

“In our first published study of 155 egg donors, we found that 30.3% reported Ovarian Hyper Stimulation Syndrome (OHSS),” Wendi Kramer, Donor Sibling Registry director and co-founder, said. “In our second survey of 176 egg donors in 2014, we found that 32.4% of egg donors reported complications such as OHSS and infection. In our third Study of 363 egg donors in 2021, 22.4% reported experiencing OHSS.”

Medical anthropologist Diane Tober found similar results in her own studies. She said:

Some clinics and agencies encourage donors to continue to donate well beyond the ASRM recommend cycle limit of six in a lifetime. One donor in my study donated 19 times! If we had a system to track donor cycles these kinds of things wouldn’t happen.

I’ve also seen donors hormonally stimulated to produce massive quantities of eggs in a single cycle. The target range is supposed to be about 15 to 20, rather than the normal one per menstrual/ovulation cycle, but some physicians aim to get as many eggs as they can out of a single donor cycle. Some donors in my study have produced as high as 80 eggs in a single cycle!

This kind of practice increases risks for the donor […but] the more eggs a donor produces the higher the profit potential to the clinic.

Unfortunately, with the ever-increasing dehumanization and commodification of children, this practice will undoubtedly continue. Children have been turned into products instead of people, and the process of buying a child includes the exploitation of others, including these students, and the destruction of countless others.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

The unethical nature of egg and sperm donation extends beyond the effects on the donors. The children involved are stripped of their humanity and treated like consumer products. As Dr. Lauren Rubal, a board-certified OB/GYN and integrative medicine physician with a subspecialty in reproductive endocrinology and infertility, explained in a video for Live Action:

An embryo is a human being at the earliest stages of his or her development, formed through a process called fertilization, when sperm and egg meet. He or she is a unique, substantially whole, new human being. Sex, blood type, hair color, eye color, are just a few of the traits immediately determined at fertilization. This new human being is one-of-a-kind, never-before-existing and never-to-exist-again. At this point in the process, these embryos have one of three fates. They’ll be transferred back to a woman’s uterus, they’ll be flash-frozen and stored, or they’ll be destroyed.

She continued, “This is the fundamental ethical issue with IVF, the destruction or abandonment of human life. A recent study showed that the number of embryos needed to optimize cumulative live birth rates was nine. This means that up to eight embryos may not survive, or will be frozen or destroyed. So effectively, you’re choosing the death of nine to get the life of one. Even though you have good intentions, you just want life. You’re also choosing all of the consequences that follow.”