Melissa Lafsky of HuffingtonPost found our panel of egg-sellers a bit too flippant, apparently.
I’m just pleased panelist Valerie Bronte’s reference to meeting her farflung offspring someday as “summoning my dark army” is now immortalized.
TODD SEAVEY author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things
5 comments:
I think she left before we talked about being conflicted. Isn’t it paternalistic (and therefore unfeminist) for this woman to tell us how we should feel? Much like Kerry’s opinion…
And just to clarify: Diana means she agrees with Kerry Howley’s assessment that preventing things like egg-selling is paternalistic, not that Lafsky’s opinion is “much like” Kerry’s opinion.
(But then, I think feminism leads inevitably, like chivalric tradition, to talking about women as hapless victims, so I say ditch both in favor of individual freedom and responsibility, ending forever the stifling, despairing reign of whiners like Lafsky, be they religionists or deconstructionists. Likewise no more Foucault for Ms. Bronte.)
i was unfortunately unable to attend. i’m curious to know how many women undertake egg donation as a way to pay off student loans. in every anecdote I’ve ever heard, paying off student debt has been a primary motivation. also, the compensation rates seem not to have gone up at all since 2001. Another part of the wage gap?
Donors are normally in their twenties, so student loans would likely be one of the most common uses of money at that point in life.
If, in good news for egg-seekers, the price hasn’t gone up much, it may simply be a result of increased competition: there’s apparently been a recent boom in sellers (but not the first, since there was apparently one in the 70s as well, I’m told).
That in turn reminds me of one of the annoying things about the Lafsky piece: People buy and sell things, often risking their bodies in the process, all the time, yet apparently there are some transactions to which the arbitrary and largely meaningless label “exploitation” (in some pejorative sense) more easily adheres in most people’s minds.
Were I a feminist (I mean, a hypothetical, more logically-consistent strain of feminist), I’d be greatly troubled by the fact that when someone decides to be a stuntman or arc-welder, people do not instinctively scream “Exploitation!” (whatever that word is thought to mean), but they readily do when it’s a precious, fragile, little woman doing things with her privates.
Luddite-feminist-conservative anti-market nonsense (not that I’m saying all that’s implied by Emily’s reasonable questions — she may well just be wondering what she’d get paid). People are free when they’re trusted to make such decisions and oppressed when they aren’t allowed to.
I, unfortunately, missed the panel.
That article, though, gives me the heebie jeebies from “I’m cold, you should put a sweater on”-ism.
That’s how Lasky would feel about donating her eggs. Yet from what I can tell, she wasn’t a single one of the women on that panel.
She’s welcome to her opinions, but it’d be nice if she stopped putting words in other people’s mouths.
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