Ova trading condemned as "prostitution"

"Assistance to childless couples or a new form of prostitution?" The stark front-page headline in Information refers to the growing debate in Denmark on the trade in human eggs. Danish women need more and more donated ova, explains the daily, because more of them are attempting to have children later in life. Since the beginning of the year, the country's main hospital, the Rigshospitalet, has inseminated 40 women who were unable to have children. The director of the hospital's fertility centre Anders Nyboe Andersen has suggested paying egg donors a fee of 1,000 euros. But that idea has been dismissed as grotesque by Dr Bente Holm Nielsen, a member of the Dansk Kvindesamfund (the Danish women's society), who insists that "treating ova as merchandise will draw women into a new form of reproductive prostitution." As it stands, the law in Denmark forbids the sale of ova. However, women who produce more than the necessary number while undergoing hormonal treatment are obliged to donate them to other women.