The Alliance for Human Biotechnology (AHB) is organizing a letter-writing campaign to the California State Senate to oppose Assembly Bill 926 which authorizes paying young women to undergo egg harvesting to extract their eggs for bio-research. The procedure, which includes taking powerful hormones for weeks, has short term risks (including death) and long term risks that have not been adequately studied, making informed consent nothing but a sham.
Previously, egg “donation” targeted college women with the “right genes” (e.g. “athletic blue-eyed blonds with high SATs”) to “donate” their eggs to help infertile women have children. If AB 926 passes, the demand for women’s eggs will increase dramatically, affecting poor women and women of color disproportionately. In addition to concerns over women’s health, egg harvesting raises concerns over biocolonialism and “designer baby” or “techno-eugenic” technologies that depend upon ready access to women’s eggs as the raw material necessary for undertaking cloning research, mitochondrial DNA transfer, etc.
Please take a moment to oppose AB 926 by signing this letter and sending it to the Senate Health Committee (address on letter) and by asking others to do the same:
Letter to CA Senate Health Committee (word docx document)
To learn more about these issues you can visit AHB’s egg donor project.
Text of AB 926 from California Legislative Information website.