California Set to Lift Restrictions on Egg Donation

Human eggs (pictured) used in research could fetch thousands of dollars, if California loosens a law regulating their procurement. Image: Flickr/Kuranosuke Oishi

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California is set to pass a bill that would allow payments over and above 'direct expenses' to be made to women who donate eggs for research. The bill promises to increase the supply of eggs to scientists studying reproduction, but will not eliminate restrictions on research supported by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San Francisco, a major funder of stem-cell research in the state.

After passing in the California State Assembly on 2 May, the bill is likely to be subject to a vote in the state senate as early as Thursday, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama, which represents fertility clinics and researchers, and pushed for the bill. "We expect this bill to pass and the governor to sign it," says Sean Tipton, the society's public-affairs director.

The bill (Assembly Bill 926) would overturn a 2006 California law that prohibits payments for research eggs for anything besides "direct expenses" such as travel. The bill instead allows compensation for "time, discomfort, and inconvenience" a standard commonly used in human studies.

In practical terms, the bill would bump up payments from hundreds to thousands of dollars. In Oregon which, like most states, does not have regulations governing egg donation women recently received US$3,0007,000 each for eggs used in a study that created stem-cell lines from cloned human embryos.

The pay boost will help researchers to compete with fertility clinics for eggs, says Dieter Egli, a researcher at the New York Stem Cell Foundation. In Massachusetts, where a law similar to that of California's makes it difficult to recruit egg donors, Egli was involved in a study that several years ago spent $100,000 in advertising to find a single egg donor.

Coercion concerns Ironically, the restrictive Massachusetts and California laws have their origins in efforts to promote human embryonic stem-cell research. In 2004, California enacted Proposition 71, a referendum which established CIRM and also mandated that women donating eggs to CIRM researchers be compensated only for direct expenses, in keeping with the policy of the US National Academy of Sciences. A separate 2006 law extended that restriction to all research in California. The new bill repeals only this broader law leaving CIRM-funded researchers without a secure source of healthy eggs.

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California Set to Lift Restrictions on Egg Donation