Higher SAT Scores Mean Your Eggs Are Worth More

Just in case society needed another way to measure a woman's worth, now the price of her eggs can be calculated based on her SAT scores. Yes, according to a recent Georgia Institute of Technology study, for every hundred points a woman's SAT score increases, she's offered $2,350 more in compensation for her eggs.

Aaron Levine, who directed the study, analyzed more than 100 ads looking for egg donors placed in college newspapers and found not only that compensation drastically increased for higher SAT scores, but also that 27% of couples were asking for specific appearances and ethnicities.

This research dovetails with the news that Fertility Institutes, an assisted reproduction clinic in L.A., had been offering genetic screening of embryos based on eye color, gender, hair color, and "complexion" (a neat little euphemism for race?) until public outcry forced them to shut this offer down. It also fits with the stories of egg donors over at Jezebel, where women talk about being selected for their height, appearance, athletic ability, race, and test scores ... but mostly for the latter two categories.

I can see the argument that egg donation empowers women -- donors can earn money and give life with their eggs, and recipients can also overcome infertility and the struggles that accompany it.  But there are several critical and disturbing flaws to this argument. There is an inherent power imbalance in the system, at least in the United States, in which the wealthy couples able to pay thousands of dollars for eggs -- and especially for specific eggs they deem of greater worth -- are essentially able to engineer their children and maintain our society's current (often messed-up) standards of beauty and intelligence. Meanwhile other, less economically advantaged couples remain stuck without options, or perhaps donating their eggs or sperm for money.

This means well-off couples looking for eggs actually, creepily, decide what qualities are desirable in women -- high test scores, tallness, thinness, whiteness -- and perpetuate the belief that these qualities are desirable both by emphasizing them in their children and by putting higher monetary value on them. It seems to me not an example of an empowering choice for women, but rather a demonstration of the same old economic, social, and racial hierarchies maintaining themselves in alarming new ways.

Photo credit: Adam UXB Smith