Impact on Women:
DUring the meeting
Questions
to guide group discussion:
1. IVF is largely considered a huge blessing to infertile couples. After studying the ways IVF, and the fertility industry as a whole, can be used, has your opinion changed or remained the same? Why?
2. Discuss some of the health risks associated with egg procurement. Does the fertility industry adequately inform and compensate the women they recruit of these risks?
3. What’s the difference between a traditional surrogate and a gestational surrogate/carrier? Is one less ethically charged than the other?
4. If women living in poverty can earn money for their families through surrogacy, why shouldn’t they be allowed to do it?
5. What would you say to a loved one who was considering earning money by being an egg donor?
6. What would you say to a loved one who was considering being a surrogate?
7. Given that there is a marketplace for purchasing babies, do egg donors and surrogates bear any responsibility for contributing to it? Why or why not?
8. Are you surprised that the fertility industry in the United States is not more regulated (particularly since most countries of the developed world have outlawed egg donation and surrogacy)?
9. Considering the impacts of surrogacy and egg “donation,” should they be legal? If legal, what conditions would you impose?
10. What role has feminism, the push for women in careers, and the later age of marriage played on a rapidly expanding fertility industry (“Big Fertility”)?
11. Is there a form of eugenics occurring in the manner in which fertility companies recruit and select egg and sperm “donors?” Should parents be able to engineer the “perfect child?” (Eugenics: A system that would allow for “the more suitable races or strains of blood to have a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable.” -Francis Galton)