Exploiting Women

Marjorie Campbell, marjorie@marjoriecampbell.com

Radical feminism promised "equality" to women, right?  Instead, it continues to ignore new forms and flavors of exploitation that compromise the health and well-being of our young women.  Consider this headline "Egg-donor business booms on campuses:  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."

But some women are speaking up.  Michele Clark and Jennifer Lahl have published an important article today in First Things, exposing the oppressive and growing practice of "harvesting" eggs from young women:  "Egg Donors and Human Trafficking".  We will be hearing more about this subject, which, like abortion, contraception and other lucrative products peddled to women, pursues commercial exploitation, not the well-being, of women.

Whenever most people hear the term “egg donor,” they usually consider this a good thing, as most of us assume that anyone who donates is altruistically motivated and thus engaged in something intrinsically good. And besides, it’s for a great cause, so everything is all right, yes?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Sadly, egg donation has less to do with altruism and more to do with the exploitation of women–particularly young women and often poor women who are usually facing large debts or just trying to make ends meet.  (Read more here.)

Comments

[Todd]

Thanks for responding, Marjorie. I guess I'd have to ask how radical is radical. Most Americans aren't extreme in their approach to feminism, one way or the other. Did the fringe of the movement really take over? I think you give the radical end of feminism far too much credit.

I find it easier to believe that egg-donor businesses know that college students can be desperate folks. It's not unlike how banks market credit cards or lenders promote easy mortgages.

I'd say that the boundaries on capitalism have eroded quite a bit over the past forty years. Radical feminism has never hit any kind of stride. All we'd have to do to check on this is to assess the egg banks' marketing approach. Do they promote making easy money? Or do they promote feminist freedom?

[marjorie campbell]

Todd, Culture imposes boundaries on capitalism (whether legal or normative). Radical feminism literally tore down centuries of cultural protections for women with the inane assertion that "equality" for women mandated "sameness" for women. So women stand by watching - some even encouraging - these dreadful assaults on female dignity, disarmed by their own delusion of sameness.

[Todd]

I don't know that this is as much the fruit of "radical feminism" as the natural consequences of capitalism run amuck: if one can make money on anything, go for it!