Wanted : young, fertile, smart and attractive women

Sounds like a personals ad, but alas it is not.  It isn't the women that are needed, it is their eggs.  From USA Today: (HT: Bioethics.com)

Five years after a trade group tried reining them in, fertility clinics and brokers are bidding up prices for eggs sold by cash-strapped college women with top test scores and picture-perfect looks.

Advertisements in campus newspapers and on websites plead daily. "Egg Donors Needed. $10,000," says one in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley.

Eggs have been traded almost since the fertility industry started 30 years ago. But now, new technologies tied to the Internet have turned the business into a global bazaar of egg merchants, with little regulatory oversight.

So how big is the fertility industry?:

We are selling children," Harvard Business School professor Debora Spar says in a new book, The Baby Business. Spar wants a national debate on bringing order and safety to an industry in which spending on everything from fertility drugs to eggs has mushroomed to an estimated $3 billion a year.

So why is egg donation a problem?:

Republican Rep. Bob Stump, who wrote the bills, says he worries the industry is taking advantage of vulnerable young women burdened by student loans...

...ASRM acknowledges potential risks, including nausea and diarrhea, from a condition known as "ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome." More severe cases can result in shortness of breath and abdominal bloating. At the most serious, the group says, there is a "remote" risk of death. Donating may also create future fertility trouble for donors. And there is the possibility of emotional problems after donors relinquish parental rights to children conceived with their eggs.

And it is only going to get worse:

The pressure on college students — the most coveted donors — is likely to grow. A sharp increase in embryonic stem-cell research programs across the USA in the past year created a new market for more donors as scientists use eggs to find medical cures.

I have an thought.  Maybe if we weren't aborting 1 million babies per year, couples could adopt instead of going through IVF.  Then there wouldn't be such a need for young women to put their fertility and health at risk for their eggs.  Stop creating and destroying embryos for research and there, problem solved!