| This post is in no way up to my usual standards of coherency. But a number of factors came together today to form a huge Sign, telling me it was time to let go of the draft sitting in my MovableType entry basket and get this out. Regarding the second story below, I have substituted a story from today's IHE for the newspaper article I originally included. You can follow the developments of the second story here. And thanks to those of you (including you, you and you) providing me with those "factors" urging me to post this. |
These two stories have been sitting checkmarked in my Bloglines "to-be-potentially-bogged-about-later" section for some time now. Not together, mind you. But both there. (Along with many, many other interesting stories, news reports, and blog posts I will probably not get to.) I happened to re-read them both today, back to back.
And the juxtaposition was startling.
I have a lot to say, but have been unable so far to put my thoughts into words. Except to say, I guess, that to me the overlap in these stories is meaningful. Even though they seem to be totally different on the surface, deeper down both stories are about similar issues of privilege and race and class and gender and higher education and entitlement. These issues criss-cross in unexpected, even profane ways--like those children's puzzles that allow one to mix heads, bodies and legs from various images to create nonsense creatures...
I know I'm not making sense so I guess I'll just let the stories talk for themselves.
From USA Today via Family Law Prof Blog:
Five years after a trade group tried reining them in, fertility clinics and brokers are bidding up prices for eggs sold by cash-strapped college women with top test scores and picture-perfect looks.Advertisements in campus newspapers and on websites plead daily. "Egg Donors Needed. $10,000," says one in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley. The ad, from a San Diego broker called A Perfect Match, seeks women who are "attractive, under the age of 29" and have SAT scores above 1,300.
...One of the biggest clinics, Genetics & IVF Institute near Washington, D.C., offers an online catalog of 100 donors in a database searchable by race, height, eye color, blood type and education. Profiles feature snapshots of donors taken when they were children to better visualize babies their eggs might produce.
There's audio, too: Downloadable recordings of donors interviewed about, say, a favorite gift. Donor No. 583 — a 5-foot-4 day care provider with a criminal justice education — recalls a pair of barrettes her son made for Mother's Day. "I had to wear them all the time," she says, laughing about the memory in her digital interview.
Sites adorned with photos and vital statistics create "a sense that you are choosing a person, rather than genetic material," Spar says. "It feels a lot like online dating."
Prospective parents want donors who look and behave much like the baby they dream of, even though there's no guarantee. The result: escalating fees for beautiful women with perfect grades — a "morally troubling" development akin to eugenics, the ASRM warned.
...Blond hair and blue eyes are big sellers. A 28-year-old lawyer near Washington with those very looks plus a good education says she earned a total $7,500 from Genetics & IVF last fall for 15 eggs....
She has started a second cycle and expects another $7,500. The payments will help pay $175,000 in school debt, she says. She says she would give eggs for free to a friend or relative. But not strangers. "I am going through injections daily and all sorts of medication," she says. "I should be compensated."
From Inside Higher Education:
...At a gathering in an off-campus home, some members of the highly ranked team were gathered — and drinking. Lacrosse is a sport largely played by white athletes — 46 of the Duke squad’s 47 members are white. Those at the party called an escort service to provide two “private dancers,” who arrived to put on a show for the students. One of the women was also a college student — at North Carolina Central University, a historically black institution also in Durham, Duke’s home.Posted by perry032 at March 29, 2006 10:54 AMThis woman, a mother of two, was helping to finance her education by working for the service.
According to the woman, she thought she was going to a small gathering, and was shocked to find herself and her fellow dancer surrounded by more than 40 college men, who shouted racial slurs at them. She also says that three members of the team raped her in a bathroom at the house.
...Particularly upsetting to Haagen and others at Duke is the impact this incident is having on the university’s image in Durham....Durham has a large minority population and many people in the city think of Duke as a wealthy institution compared to their own means.
“I suspect that whatever happens in this investigation, even if the DNA testing comes back negative, people are going to think there was a cover-up. This will become a reality,” Haagen said.
And that reality of course looks different at North Carolina Central than at Duke. Most of the public attention has been about Duke, but there are also issues raised by the fact that a college student felt she needed to support herself by working for an escort service.
...[Roland Gaines, vice chancellor for student affairs at North Carolina Central] said that many students at the college are indeed “financially challenged” and that he regularly receives visits from students who can’t make ends meet and are desperate for some sort of help or another job. The student told The Raleigh News & Observer that she typically took three assignments a week from the service, and that while she did not like the work, it paid well and fit her schedule.
“It’s obviously a real concern that we have a student who feels she needs to go to an escort service for additional income,” Gaines said. “It never, ever crossed my mind that we would have students do that”...