We can understand when starving people sell themselves (prostitution), or parts of themselves (like organ donation), in order to survive. We should do all we can to help people so that they don’t have to do these things, but we can understand their need.

However a new market has arisen where people are making offers to young university students, struggling to pay high education fees. They are desirable for their “good” genes. Males are sought for their sperm and females for their “eggs”. The Internet reveals that males in the US are offered between US $65 and $100 per donation while Ivy League University women can be offered as much as US $50,000 by “egg brokers”. (Bioedge: US women join class-action lawsuit demanding more money for eggs. 16/4/2011)

Money overrules ethical and moral considerations and especially human respect. There is a serious loss of respect for the dignity of the human person, even oneself. Although the human gametes spermatozoa and ova (eggs) are not human beings, they still carry the DNA of the person from which they came. Combined with other appropriate gametes, they can become a human being, carrying the human signatures of the parents. They are part of the giftedness of every human being - his or her fertility - a gift of God not a curse, not a spare part to be sold or thrown away. They represent the continuation, the future, of the human race via the instrumentality of each individual.

Human fertility is part of God’s plan to bring people into the world so that he can love them. It is a precious gift to the human race intended by God to be utilised within the precious gift of marriage between a woman and a man for the proper formation and school of love that prepares us as children for an eternal relationship of joy and happiness with God who is relationship - Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three Divine persons but one God.

Sperm and egg donation, however, is intended for the “romantic” meeting of two strangers - who will never even know each other - in a Petri dish in the full glare of the lights of a laboratory and brought together by laboratory technicians - other strangers. Think of the feelings of the future child conceived in this dish; in some cases the child cannot know either of his “parents”, those anonymous donors who made possible the conception “for the love of money”, not the child.

Other ghastly consequences are:

(1) for every child conceived in a Petri dish more than 30 other conceptions (persons) are lost or discarded because, in order to more fully guarantee an embryo attaching to a womb (a surrogate mother?), many ova have to be placed in the dish with sperm to get an unknown number of embryos. The excess conceived persons in embryonic form are either discarded or frozen.

(2) Several embryos are placed in the womb because the procedure produces far less attachments than normal conception. If several embryos attach, the excess may then be killed in what is termed “selective reduction”, otherwise one can wind up like Nadia Suleman with eight children.

(3) There is a higher risk of birth defects in IVF conceived children and a possibility of later problems. (The Westchester Institute. In Vitro Fertilization - Why Not. 6/4/2010)

This whole process is ruled by greed and self-interest. The dignity of the donors is ignored by the “brokers” and by themselves and, in particular, the dignity of the children conceived and frozen or killed. Even the dignity of those brought to term but given no sense of self-worth (no knowledge of their real parents; bought like merchandise for the self-satisfaction of surrogate parents) is ignored. The hedonistic cultures of today are creating people dislocated from themselves, their ancestry and from true love.

The Church teaches, that in light of this same human dignity, every human being possesses a right to be “conceived and born within marriage and from marriage.”