Slipping away from Harvard for a week last June, a PhD candidate named Rachel, a tall strawberry blond with a creamy complexion and blue-green eyes, jetted to San Francisco for an unusual tryst.
Awaiting her was a wealthy Bay Area couple, desperate for a baby, willing to pay Rachel thousands of dollars to help them realize their dream.
The middle-age husband and wife, who found Rachel through a San Diego broker, were attracted as much to her slender, 5-foot-11 frame and Norwegian ancestry as they were to her Ivy League pedigree.
"You look even more gorgeous than the pictures," she recalled one of the pair saying.
The next morning, under general anesthesia, a needle poked into Rachel's ovaries and harvested 17 eggs ripened by weeks of hormone shots. They were then fertilized with the husband's sperm and implanted into the wife's womb.
For her donation, Rachel made about $18,000, just enough to cover a semester at an Ivy League school. She was back in California again in February--this time in San Diego, to do business with another couple.
"I asked for a little more this time," she said, "and they agreed to it."
California has become the center of a flourishing egg-donation industry that increasingly recruits women from university campuses nationwide.
"Pay your tuition with eggs," reads one of the ubiquitous advertisements in college newspapers. California brokers now recruit heavily from the nation's top academic institutions--Harvard, Yale and Stanford--promoting their donors' eggs on Web sites and in brochures as name-brand genetic material.
With the number of egg transplants--each usually involving multiple eggs--surpassing 7,000 in 1998 and doubling every two to three years, the fierce competition has forced brokers to offer ever larger financial enticements.
Ads promising payments as high as six figures have created a split in the once low-profile industry, raising ethical concerns about targeting young women who are struggling with the spiraling costs of higher education.
More established egg brokers accuse brash newcomers of crude recruiting tactics that stress short-term gain and downplay the risks of hormone treatments and invasive surgery.
"What would you do if you sent your child away to the university and you found out she was donating her eggs?" says longtime broker Karen Synesiou, director of Egg Donation Inc. in Beverly Hills, who no longer advertises in campus newspapers because she believes that most undergraduates are too young to provide the service.
