First off, only a small percentage of women qualify for the really big bucks of myth; to qualify at all a woman must be between 21 and 30, not have traveled (mad cow), and be healthy. Genetic disorders, depression, a family history of cancer or diabetes, and even piercings and tattoos can all be deal-breakers. And of that population (whose family members have, apparently, never visited a doctor), only those with excellent SATs are double-digit desirable.

Then, it's a time commitment: the competitive application process is involved and prolonged, and the actual donation requires a number of appointments over several months. And then there are the health risks. As Nerve describes it,

The most hazardous side effect, Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome (OHSS), is a complication occasionally seen in women who take certain fertility medicines that stimulate egg production. The symptoms of OHSS can include bloating, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, excessive weight gain, shortness of breath, and sometimes kidney or liver failure. In addition, during the procedure, the patient is in immediate danger, as a careless doctor can puncture the donor's bowel, bladder, or blood vessels. And while the long-term physical effects of egg donation have not been well studied (the practice has only existed for about twenty-five years), some evidence suggests an increased risk of ovarian cancer and early menopause. Women can only produce so many eggs in their lifetime.

Which is not to say that no one should do it - many women apparently talk about the altruism of the gesture and the satisfaction of helping increasing numbers of applicants have a family, to say nothing off paying off debts - simply that porn and a cup, this isn't. For a long time doctors have worried that the sky-high potential payments have made donors cavalier about the risks of the procedure. Indeed, this is the rationale behind Great Britain's policy of setting a £250 cap (incidental costs and earnings lost) on such payments. However, the increasing demand - and the open-secret practice of couples going abroad for eggs - is causing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, a watchdog, to review their policy. (None of it an issue for those of us with diabetes genes or bad math scores, of course - our eggs, like Veruca Salt, don't make the cut.)

Fall Harvest [Nerve]

Related: Women May Be Paid For Eggs: Fertility Watchdog [Telegraph]
Egg And Sperm Donation Rules To Be Reviewed [Independent]

An at-home test of a woman's current ovarian reserve — and thus her likelihood of being able to conceive — has been available since spring. But Norbert Gleicher of the Center for Human Reproduction thinks he can go a step further, using a woman's genes to predict when her ovarian reserve will begin to fall. He has discovered that variations in the Fragile X or FMR1 gene are associated with early ovarian aging and thereby with an early drop in fertility. By testing this gene, he believes he can predict whether a young woman is at risk of early ovarian aging, and thus help her make decisions about when to try to conceive. Gleicher says,

Then you can sit down and have a discussion about her reproductive life plan. In other words, 'do you want to have your kids before you get your PhD, or afterwards?' If the answer is 'afterwards', OK, but maybe you want to freeze some eggs.

Of course, it's not quite that simple. Egg freezing, for one, is expensive and not a sure thing. And critics of Gleicher's research say he still needs to do follow-up studies to determine whether women with the genetic markers for early ovarian aging actually have trouble conceiving. Writing in New Scientist, Linda Geddes says,

[A] test reliable enough to transform the lives of a large number of women will likely involve a series of genetic and hormonal markers. It will also need rigorous testing to ensure woman aren't burdened with anxiety - or given false hope.

Her last sentence seems key: Gleicher's test would need to be pretty foolproof for women to be able to plan their lives around it, especially because such planning tends to be messier than he lets on. Deciding when to have a child depends on a lot of factors besides how your Ph.D. research is going — women have to consider their finances, their health, whether they want to raise the kid with a partner and whether they've met that partner yet, and simply whether it feels like the right time for them to reproduce. A reliable test to predict future fertility would give women information to help them make these decisions, but they'll probably never be easy or cut-and-dried.

Of course, there are ways society could make them easier. Subsidized child care and better maternity leave would be a couple. Another comes up in the Daily Mail coverage of Gleicher's research. The old Fail isn't as obnoxious as usual on this, beyond a weird photo of a woman looking pensive while pressing her head to a man's belly (is he pregnant?). But the article, by David Derbyshire, does start with the line, "A DNA test that can tell a women in her early 20s how long she has left to start a family is being developed by scientists." This is a relatively small linguistic quibble, but Gleicher's test doesn't measure "how long a woman has left to start a family" — it measures how long she may have to conceive a child from her own eggs. There are other ways to "start a family," like adoption, and plenty of couples think of themselves as a family even if they don't have kids. If we reformed adoption laws to make adoption easier and more affordable, more kids might find homes and women could stop tying their ability to raise children so directly to their egg reserves. And if we gave child-free people their due as valid families, maybe we'd also stop viewing a woman's ability to reproduce as a measure of her value. More information about women's fertility would be a good thing — but it's worth remembering that no genetic test is going to magically make our reproductive lives easy.

Genes Show When A Woman's Biological Clock Will Stop [New Scientist]
DNA Fertility Test Warns Women How Long They Have Left To Start A Familys [Daily Mail]

In the early days, Julia cooked in a super-retro studio kitchen, in black and white, with a theme that sounds like the score of an old French cartoon. Back then, she was teaching America the basics: in this case, to look beyond sunny-side-up and towards a nice glass of wine and a crisp green salad. She was also way less poised and always seemed to have run a marathon. Can you imagine how dispiriting it must have been to deal with crappy supermarket produce after the farmer's markets of France? Today's cooks would swoon at the thought of a non-free-range egg! But we never hear a peep or a complaint; Julia wasn't about making us feel bad - rather, about sharing her enthusiasms.

Julia Child The French Chef (1964): Elegance with Eggs [PBS]

Earlier: Child's Play: "The Temptation Of Eve" A Disaster
Child's Play: Collars & Cheese

Lehmann-Haupt decided to undergo the procedure because at 37, she was "single and worried about losing my chance to have a child." In her research into the procedure, she talked to its inventors, Italian Drs. Raffaella Fabbri and Eleanora Porcu, who first envisioned egg freezing as a way around the Catholic Church's ban on freezing embryos. While Fabbri supports the use of egg freezing to extend fertility, Porcu thinks the process is "harmful to feminism." She told Lehmann-Haupt:

It means that we're accepting a mentality of efficiency in which pregnancy and motherhood are marginalized. We've demonstrated that we are able to do everything like men. Now we have to do the second revolution, which is not to become dependent on a technology that involves surgical intervention. We have to be free to be pregnant when we are fertile and young.

If Porcu would in fact like workplaces to make it easier for women to have children while still building their careers, this is a good thing. But being "free to be pregnant" and finding the right situation in which to have a child are two different things, and, regardless of job status, some women don't find themselves in that situation until later in life. The ability not to put a time limit on your desire for a family is a freedom too. Porcu acknowledged this, calling egg-freezing for Lehmann-Haupt, "an additional tool to fight against unfair nature. You want to survive as a fertile woman." But she then cautioned Lehmann-Haupt that she might be too old for the procedure.

She wasn't — she was eventually able to freeze eight mature eggs, the number considered necessary for one pregnancy. Her doctor recommended another cycle in case she wanted to have another child, but at $15,000 a pop, Lehmann-Haupt couldn't afford it. This issue — the cost — may be the real downside to egg-freezing technology. There's no guarantee that a woman can conceive from frozen eggs, but the process is marketed aggressively. The first comment on the Newsweek article reads:

I think it's great that you are being proactive about your fertility. You know you want to be a mother some day - and you're making that a priority. Too many people are unrealistic about their fertility as they see celebrities magically getting pregnant in their forties. You will never regret taking this step - only not taking it. I am part of a team that has developed a new web portal www.fertilityauthority.com and we are trying to encourage women to be proactive about their fertility.
We welcome you to visit our site and share your story with many women out there like you who are thinking about freezing their eggs. -Kerry Walker FertilityAuthority

Egg-freezing technology at this point seems like a mixed blessing — a way for some women to extend their fertility, but also yet another way for companies to capitalize on women's anxiety. In an ideal world, the price would come down, and women could exercise this option without forking over thousands.

Why I Froze My Eggs [Newsweek]

In a study published in the journal Nature Cell Biology, Chinese researchers performed experiments on mice, showing for the first time that a mammal can produce new eggs as an adult that lead to healthy offspring, reports theWashington Post. Scientists from Shanghai Jiao Tong University identified female germ line stem cells in ovaries removed from mice. After coaxing the cells to multiply, they were injected into sterile mice. Some of the cells matured into eggs, and another group of mice was able to produce healthy offspring.

While men produce new sperm daily, for at least 50 years scientists have believed that female mammals are born with all the eggs they will ever have and the supply is depleted over time, leaving them infertile after menopause. The new study raises new possibilities for the treatment of infertility, as freezing stem cells may be more efficient than freezing eggs and there may be ways to stimulate the cells to produce eggs in older women. The cells may also have a use in stem cell research by producing embryonic stem cell lines specific to individual patients.

Several recent studies have suggested that women may generate more eggs during adulthood, but this is the first time scientists have obtained the cells that can produce healthy new eggs from a mammal. "If you are looking to disprove that females cannot make new eggs, this paper proves it. It's a really significant paper," said Harvard Medical School professor Jonathan L. Tilly, who published some of the earlier research. "This is the smoking gun."

Other scientists say more research needs to be done on humans, not mice, and question if the mice used in the experiment were really completely sterilized. "The aging process of the human egg differs fundamentally from that of the mouse egg," said David L. Keefe, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of South Florida. "Except at Disney World, humans are not large mice."

Still, doctors hope that the cells could lead to new procedures someday, especially since treating infertility has become a lucrative, multibillion dollar business. The L.A. Times reports that the competition became so intense at the Huntington Reproductive Center in Pasadena, one of the biggest fertility practices on the West coast, that it has spurred a series of lawsuits. After founder Dr. Joel Batzofin's business grew to make a $5 million yearly profit, his five partners took a secret vote and ousted him from the business. The former partners sued each other in a six year legal battle that led to private detectives posing as patients. A female detective submitted to an ultrasound of her uterus and ovaries, and one of the doctors gave his own sperm sample to a rival doctor, pretending to be a patient, all in an effort to show that Batzofin was violating a non-compete agreement at his new practice. "It's a cutthroat business," said Batzofin. "There is a lot of greed."

But according to another new study published this week, even more women may be turning to fertility treatments, as having a high-powered career has supposedly been linked to lowered fertility. The Times of London reports that University of Utah anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan found that women with stressful careers experience a hormonal shift that replaces estrogen with male androgens that are associated with strength, stamina, and competitiveness.

Cashdan analyzed the waist to hip ratio (WHR) of women from 37 different populations and cultures, and found the average WHR to be above 0.8. She says that due to a hormonal shift, the women had a more straight-up-and-down figure that is less conducive to child-bearing. Previous studies have found that women with an hourglass figure, with a WHR of 0.7 are the most fertile.

"Although the hormonal profile associated with a high WHR may favour success in some stressful and difficult circumstances where women must work hard, there are well-known costs," said Cashdan. "Women may suffer lower fertility and possibly lower attractiveness to men who may have an innate preference for curviness."

A Possible Step Toward Setting The Biological Clock [The Washington Post]
Fertility Doctors' Competition Spawns Lawsuits [The L.A. Times]
Is Your Career Making You Infertile? [The Times of London]

[Los Angeles, April 12. Image via INF]

As you see, it's eggs. With Disney characters stamped on the shells. Possibly selling at a markup. Is this some kind of tie-in to a movie, or further proof of the evils of agribusiness and the coming apocalypse? And while marketers obviously want to trick kids into believing that the plain old eggs are going to come out magically Mickey-shaped, we want to know: 1. Do the eggs come with the mold? 2. How much does said mold cost? 3. Does egg actually seep out from under edges of said mold, rendering shape unrecognizable, as has been the case in all our experiments with whimsical egg-shapery? The only way I can see this strangely low-fi "new product" swaying any egg-hater is if you give them something shell-on, ie hard-boiled or soft-cooked. Even then, any kid is quickly going to get wise to the fact that it's just a plain old egg, but a prancing Donald Duck might buy you a reluctant bite or two.

The study examined completed questionnaires of 80 egg donors from around the U.S. All of the women participating had been paid for donating their eggs, with payments ranging from $1,100 to $7,300. In the questionnaires, two-thirds of women rated their feelings about the entire experience (including the months of no booze, no smoking, no sex) as one hundred percent positive. The other third was not so certain.

The most common negative feelings women reported on the survey were frustration that the donation process was anonymous, and feeling that they had been underpaid (considering the physical side effects reported, which include ovarian cysts, fertility problems and weight gain, its not hard to understand why a woman would feel underpaid receiving $1,100 for the unrestricted access to her fallopian tubes). Seven of the women who responded said that they were still curious to know exactly what happened to their eggs, and whether any children were brought to term with their DNA. Two donors “developed ongoing concerns that a child that they bear and raise might, by chance, meet and develop a relationship with her donor offspring.” Although two women out of eighty can hardly be considered representative of the general population of egg donors, it is interesting that a significant number of respondents aren’t thrilled with their choice.

Another important factor that is often ignored is the economic aspect of the transaction. The survey did ask about the monetary compensation, however, it did not mention any correlation between the happy donors and the well-paid donors. While they reported that some women claim they were not motivated purely by altruistic reasons, and some (the more honest ones?) admit that money was their sole motivation, the article did not provide numbers for these respondents.

In last months Wall Street Journal, “Annie,” a 29-year-old lawyer, said that she chose to donate her eggs not because she needed the money, but because she “thought it was a great thing to do to help people.” Unfortunately, her admirable act did leave her “heartbroken” when the baby conceived with her egg died in utero. The second couple who received her eggs wanted an anonymous arrangement, so Annie does not know whether or not there is a baby on the way. Annie says that although she will probably donate again, being an egg donor "is something to seriously think about, and not just go into for the money. You have to ask yourself, once this process is over and there's this baby out there, how are you going to feel? Think about it — a lot."

Egg Donation: Most Donors Satisfied [CBS]

Related: Women Line Up To Donate Eggs [WSJ]

Earlier: Do Women Really Become Surrogates For Purely Altrustic Reasons?

• The McCain strategist who thought it was a brilliant idea to have him give a speech at the Lorraine Motel on the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination to apologize for having voted against MLK Day should probably not keep his job. [CBS News]
  
• The advance staffer who gave the world the image of an African-American man holding an umbrella over McCain during the speech needs to go, too. [HuffPo]
  
• Hillary Clinton's speechwriters, who wrote a speech that, for once, actually played to her oratorical skills, should stay. The guy who decided to coin the phrase "Poverty Czar"? Probably not. [NY Times]
  
• Oooh, blind item: which one of you lesbian, bonerkilling commentwhores was dragged out of a Hillary event in Los Angeles? Fess up! [Breitbart]

• Hillary's tax returns are out, and yeah, the Clintons are ridiculously rich. [Yahoo]
• One would think that there'd be no way to make a story about Clinton and Madonna boring. One would think wrong. [HuffPo]
• Even though he took $10 million from Hillary's campaign and then used his position of prominence as a lobbyist to undercut her stance against the Colombian Free Trade Agreement, Mark Penn gets to just apologize and continue raking in that cash. [Politico]
• Speaking of unemployment, it's up, of course. [LA Times]
• But the Michigan do-over is down for the count. [WaPo]
• Not that there aren't bigger election problems other places, like ZImbabwe. [WaPo]
• In case you want a little quiet reflection on events past but always remembered, you can read RFK's words about MLK's assassination, the words of the witnesses to the assassination (who still haven't been questioned by police?) and then a somber piece about why so many people fear for Obama's safety, even today.

Then I realized "cholesterol" was a scam designed to sell expensive pills to old people and that eggs don't really do that anyway and also: since when have I been one to worry about shit like cholesterol?

Anyway, at the risk of sounding like some sort of Sesame Street parody I love eggs like Jay-Z loves girls; fat kid: cake, etc. etc. even the nasty spongy Starbucks sandwich kinds, even the ones where you ask the guy to poach em soft and they come out all chunky and hard: fuckit, they're great. Jessica is with me; she eats ten a week; Maria eats around 7; Cheryl 5, Tracie varies — she's on a poop-friendly regimen right now — and Anna eats about 12. But just the whites, ma'am. "I predict I will be a vegetarian in three years and a vegan by the time I'm 40," she says. In the meantime, though, we are all eating eggs. What the fuck else can we afford?

Skipping Cereal And Eggs, And Packing On The Pounds [NYT]
Rise In Price Of Eggs Is No Chicken Feed [SF Gate]
Starbucks Announces New Service Upgrades (Upgrades? What is this, Pravda?.) [Time]
Ask Men: Eggs [AskMen]
Why Egg Prices Are Cracking Budgets [Chicago Tribune]

In the bedroom, Jezebel might be described as a "sloppy vixen."

• She explored early: over half of you learned how to orgasm before the age of 15, and nearly a third of you can masturbate if someone else is in the room, thanks to the freshman dormroom situation.
• Over 40% of you would totally bone down with your friends exes, but only if there were no emotional attachment.
• And a third of you have HPV. Perhaps you got it from your friend's ex-boyfriend?
• In her defense, if Jezebel is a slut, she's an honest slut: nearly half of you only lie by a 1-3 partner margin of error when giving your "number"; 27% of you don't even know your number.
• Jezebel prefers "Sade sex" to "Slayer sex", and forget doing her up the ass; 35% of you are haven't even had butt sex, and less than a quarter of you actually like it.
• And the room she likes to get down in? It's 54% likely to make Moe's look clean.
• And who she gets down with? He's a lot more likely to force you to watch "Stripes" than go anywhere near, like, guns and shit.

  
  Meanwhile, Jezebel's stance on current affairs might be described as "bleeding-heart realist."

  • When it comes to cuteness, Jez is mostly color-blind. In movie stars you are most likely to fantasize over the Caucasian Clive Owen, but when it comes to babies you kind of want a Maddox, although you love the rest of the Jolie-Pitt babes pretty evenly. You're deeply appalled by racism in celebrities, even when they are as dumb as Paris Hilton. You're good at compartmentalizing; you'll admit it when an enemy of democracy happens to be kind of hot. But when it comes to democracy protesters you narrowly prefer Pakistan's lawyers to Burma's monks, though much of that margin can be attributed to the dramatically-increased likelihood that the lawyers will actually have sex with you. You aren't delusional.
  • Which may explain why Jezebel is deeply skeptical that violent sex offenders can be rehabilitated, even when they are underage. About 20% of you wanted to see that group of teenage gang rapist-pornographers castrated and/or sentenced to death.
  • Jez has a nose for white lies and falsehoods: almost half of you believe Tyra banks is lying when she says she's never had plastic surgery.
  • Nearly 60% of you expect you'll vote for Hillary, but half of that 60% admit it would only to be to get Bill back and make it stop.
  • Because a mere 7.2% of you wanted Bush to be our president in 2004, and that number has not gotten higher since.

  The Jezebel lifestyle is definitely something to aspire to.

  • Over 50% of you think you're to old to have an abortion when your eggs are too old to hock on the black market .
  • And once born, of you think three or maybe four is too old to be carrying around a kid.
  • 81% of you think Michael Lohan is a better parenting role model than the "White Oprah."
  • You're highbrow about your media consumption: 64% of you prefer Tina Fey's comedic gems to Kim Kardashian's gem of an ass, and basically all of you would rather read anything than Teen Vogue.
  • And finally, definitely all of you drink too much. What a segue! Go do that now!

  So anyway, there you have it — a brief glimpse into the heart, soul and boy-panties of your garden-variety Jezebel. She's an HPV-havin', Tyra-disbelievin', bleeding-heart slob who chronically masturbates to fantasies of Clive Owen, and we wouldn't have her any other way.