Wednesday, 17 September 2014

I CAN'T GET EXCITED ABOUT MORE 'COMPENSATION' FOR EGG DONORS (Letter to Dom Post, September 17)

I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about what Andrew Murray of Fertility Associates Wellington sees as a need for more ‘compensation’ here for egg donors for women in their 40s trying to conceive. Quite apart from the highly questionable ethics of surrogacy, they’ve made their bed and can lie on it, like all the women who forgo a career to have babies in their 20s and live with the consequences.

 

Murray’s exercised about driving couples offshore with associated  ‘risks for families to the health and wellbeing of mother and baby and the large financial investment’. (Not to mention loss of customers onshore.) What about men aged 70+ being accepted for hugely expensive IVF treatment? Should he not be exercised about consequent multiple pregnancies - which he acknowledges as frequently having expensive complications - a mother’s life-threatening illnesses, the grief of deaths in utero and in at least one case, resulting poverty and stress culminating in the removal of surviving children by the supposedly benevolent offices of Child, Youth and Family?

 

Dr Murray is entitled of course, to make a living. But how much of a living, and at what cost to others?

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