Not Fertile? Not a Problem

First I saw them when traveling on BART. Then I got home and tuned to the classical station and heard them. I'm beginning to feel tracked. They're fertility treatment ads for a for-profit fertility treatment center in San Francisco. That's right; for profit. But I'm sure they have everyone's best interests at heart. It's not that I begrudge women this option; what gets me worked into a hot lather is the marketing campaign around a procedure that is neither easy nor fail-safe, nor covered by insurance. 

Or maybe it's that the ad in BART wasn't to get a fertility treatment: it was after my eggs (well, not mine, but someone 20 years younger with better SAT scores). They're also all over the classifieds (someone must still be reading those). As the popularity and well, simply the stigma attached to IVF goes away as older women seek to reproduce, the demand for those young, healthy eggs will only increase. And it strikes me as a little too much like trafficking in flesh. I imagine two vastly different types of women, one providing -- shouldered with higher education loans and a low-paying first job, willing to give up what she has for a nice, fat check. On the other end are the highly successful women who never had time to think about their eggs until it was too late, now lining up to thumb through the books of descriptions and photos of the eggs for sale. What she can't offer on her own is now yet another problem solved with stacks of cash.