An internet service which claims to be the first to offer a global database of human eggs for sale to infertile women has been launched in Britain.
The website, www.WomanNotIncluded.com, offers eggs to women prepared to pay a registration fee, and then extra for searches of the database and consequent introductions. The service is an offshoot of an existing website, www.ManNotIncluded.com, which supplies mail order sperm to single women and lesbian couples, who have found clinics resistant to helping them find donors.
Although both services are legal, some groups question whether profiting from the sale of eggs and sperm is morally acceptable. The supply of eggs is a more complicated affair than the supply of sperm, since donors normally require hormone injections to promote the multiple production of eggs, and then an operation to remove them.
Subscribers will pay an initial £145 and then between £600 and £1,200 for each match with a potential donor. Donors register for free. Arrangements are then made for the woman to anonymously donate her eggs at a fertility clinic where screening, IVF and implantation take place, all at extra cost to the recipient.