oh okay, seeing as you insist 
Here in Aus it is about to become legal to therapeutically clone embryos for stem cell research. Legistlation is set to pass the upper house of parliament this week. This move will put us on par with the UK.
But now that our scientists will be able to conduct somatic cell nuclear transfer (or cloning) they're gonna need to get hold of eggs.
In aust we have laws banning the sale of any human tissue (not the case in the US, I understand, where everything's a commodity, even life, but I digress) which means you can't buy oocytes (eggs) but need to rely on the largesse of altruistic donors.
But with the pending change in legislation there's a move to consider paying women for their eggs. This would represent a major shift in terms of both policy and philosophy.
So my original question (to myself) was, should women be paid for their eggs?
Is payment a form of undue inducement which will force women to be exploited for their eggs? I understand in the US it's poor, uneducated, largely hispanic women who sell their eggs. OTOH, is it only fair to compensate women for an invasive, painful and inconvenient procedure?
Don't know if anyone else out there gives a ***, but I think this is a fascinating meeting of science, commerce and women's issues.
This is indeed an interesting issue on a number of counts. I give a good deal more than a *** about it, but am not yet certain of my overall stance on it. In UK, whilst organ donation is being increasingly encouraged, no one here currently expects payment in return for a kidney, liver, etc. Organ donation is, of course, almost exclusively for transplantation supply purposes, although a very small amount of it is for pure research rather than transplantation. Ironically, certain possible results of stem cell research may, among other things, eventually lead to some reduction in the need for transplantation surgery.
The question of whether it's reasonable for women to expect payment for undergoing an "invasive, painful and inconvenient procedure" is one that simply cannot be overlooked. If, however, one considers how transplantation surgery has developed from the days of its infancy to a point where much of it is infinitely less invasive for the recipient than once it was (kidney transplants, for example, are far more invasive for the donor than for the recipient nowadays), it may be that the best way - or at least one way - to address this question is to spend some time first trying to figure out ways of reducing the invasiveness, pain and inconvenience of the procedure as now it stands; not being medically qualified, I have no idea what mileage there may be in this, but it should at lest be thoroughly investigated, because the results may possibly come to impact upon the preceived moral balance in terms of whether payment should or should not be offered and/or expected.
One may suppose there tio be potential dangers in the offering of payment to people to provide this form of medical supply.
One is a possible growth in expectation that people should come to consider provision of such a service as an inescapable duty because they are going to be paid for it; I am not necessarily going so far as to suggest that this kind of practice may ever reach the coercion stage (although in certain extreme égimes this could conceivably rear its ugly head), but the question of possible stigma surrounding refusal might well become a kind of political hot potato as time goes by.
Another is the question of who decides who pays how much to whom and whether, how and to what extent such payments are to be taxed - to put it crudely, there might, for example, be an argument that, if any tax at all is deemed to be due, some donors may consider that selling part of themselves should attract capital gains tax on the disposal of an asset rather than income tax.
Yet another is that it could - and, I imagine, would indeed be likely to - create a precedent wherein people would then expect to start charging for supplying organs, tissue, etc.; this could be quite a problem insofar as, when organ transplants are undertaken, the recipient and donor usually (or is it always? - perhaps you can correct me here) have to be of the same blood group, so organs belonging to those of the rarer blood groups will very soon figure out (if they've not done so already) that they could put a vastly higher price on their organs than those of more common blood groups. This "rarity factor" and the concomitant expectation of financial profit would likely end up as being no different from any other rarity value in determining expectations from sales.
Another is already raised by you in your reference to the idea of exploiting the poor for such medical supplies; people in more impecunious circumstances as well as those in serious debt for whatever reason will inevitably feel more pressurised - by force of circumstance if not necessarily by anyone's direct coercion - to participate than others who don't need the money to the same extent.
You are correct to suggest that the business - and it will indeed be just that - a business - of supplying one's spare or "spareable" parts - be they eggs, organs, tissue or whetever - will exemplify a kind of personal physical commodification exercise. I happen to think that, whatever any of the consequences of that may be, governments will nevertheless, one by one, come to sanction such business operations, especially if they see them as yet another potential source of tax revenue to "invest back into provision of more medical services" (by which of course I mean "waste on going to war in Iraq, or somewhere"). Whenever such businesses operate, there will, of course, be a need for the middlemen (and women) - the agents who will take their cuts out of matching seller to buyer - a business in itself generated by the existence of another business. Of course, in countries where there is - or is perceived to be - a thriving state health service such as UK, France, Spain, etc., all this kind of activity will be expected to be conducted through that state health system - so the purchaser of the supplies will always be the government of the day; it will be interesting to see people whose assets are deeemd by market forces to be of especial value engage in negotiations with their governments as to how much they'll get for their supplies, especially if any of them say, "I'm not accepting less than × thousand dollars per egg / organ / mg. of tissue / whatever, so if you won't pay my price I'll offer it / them on eBay to the highest bidder in a country where I can get more".
On top of all of that, you can just see the insurance industry perceiving a whole new area of business to be exploited, can you not?!
That's my two cents' worth for now...
Best,
Alistair
Topic: God killed the soapbox star