There are about 3X as many white women as black in the US but white women get 8X as much for donated eggs and Diane M. Tober in "Eggonomics" suggests wealthy people looking for specific traits has gotten to the point of being eugenics.

I hate to break it to the public but eugenics never really left. When progressives like Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and economist John Maynard Keynes saw their beliefs about government manipulation of evolution writ large in 1940s Germany, the name began to die, but not the sentiment. Margaret Sanger, for example, pivoted to creating Planned Parenthood - but her goal of picking winners and losers among offspring did not change. Another eugenics proponent hijacked the environmental movement and went away from the original cleaner water and neighborhoods for the poor in cities and founded Sierra Club to promote better hiking trails for wealthy elites.

People engage in casual eugenics all of the time. Short women don't need to date tall men, it reduces the pool of men for tall women, but they want what they want. Is 'I buy a service, I get what I want' happening in egg donations or is it something more sinister?



During a presidential election, eugenics is an awkward problem to have come up again. Buying a donated egg is expensive and the richest people in America support the Democratic party. All of the wealthiest states vote Democrat in the US vote Democrat and even if we expand the pool to the wealthiest 25 counties, Democrats still hold nearly 70%.



Blue means green, the color of money. It seems fitting, even empowering, that egg donors who want to augment their income go into that business at a time when they need it. Wealthy people using market forces to tell black women they are worth 8% of white women isn't going to get out the vote for their party in November.

That may not be happening. There is a demand, and someone will provide the supply, but it also means your demand is based on what can quantify about you, and companies in that business are going to ask everything they can, which is why some critics invoke eugenics.

Yet it is actually proof it may not be that at all. If you are spending $100,000 and up for an egg, you can bet you're going to feel like you have the right to choose the height and whether or not their parent died young of heart disease. That doesn't explain all of the disparity, though. Tober found that the most expensive egg from a black donor was just $12,000.

These are not adoptions so it is reasonable that parents want kids who aren't going to feel different from their parents, so skin matters. Black people are ~13% of the population so they're going to have corresponding demand. Fair enough, except the top-valued egg, $250,000, was Chinese. They are a tiny fraction of the market compared to blacks and latinos but the degree was from MIT, so maybe education is a proxy for the qualities that wealthy people really want.

Or Asians are so rich cost is no object.

I am in my late 50s and in terrific health. No medication and even my hair hasn't turned gray yet. I write for a living, lettered in sports in high school and college, and play a musical instrument. Yet my age will be correlated by epidemiologists to a higher incidence of things like autism or an intellectual disability. If I were donating sperm, the person spending the money absolutely wants to know how old I am. 

Is that really discrimination?