Infertility

A student contemplating selling her eggs tells her friend: "Doing this is illegal in the UK.

No money must change hands." Patrick wanted to offer choices.

But, as a childless postman told his wife, some people haven't got the money to be choosy.

Those who can afford to be choosy send their kids to private school.

And 30 Minutes: We Don't Need No Private Education (Friday, Channel 4) was a soap-box for Phil Beadle, a contributor to last year's The Unteachables.

Beadle claimed that a private education is a waste of money.

He dredged up a report that said the more you spend on sending your kids to school, the worse they will do at university.

As an experiment, he asked a class of private-school kids to compare his teaching to that of their regular teacher, Ms Pearson.

At the end of the lessons, one pupil said he preferred Ms Pearson because he could make lots of good notes for an essay.

Another preferred Beadle's style.

Beadle concluded that teaching in private school was no better than in state schools.

He presented this information as though we should be astonished, when really the astonishing thing is that it's taken some people so long to notice.

Chris Rock didn't get where he is today by being privately educated, but his mother did send him on a two-bus trip so that he could be educated with white children.

We learned this from Everybody Hates Chris (Sunday, five), ...

The web is littered with sites featuring cute US college students with eggs for sale.

The dark underbelly of the billion-dollar US fertility industry was exposed two years ago by Julia Derek, a Swedish student studying in the USA, who made tens of thousands of dollars in nine egg “donations” to private US clinics.

In Confessions of a Serial Egg Donor, Ms Derek described how donating eggs to fund her studies damaged her ovaries and left her an emotional wreck.

“Would some poor girl have to die before US clinics are properly regulated,” she asked.

But at least in Spain and the USA, there is some regulation.

In other parts of the world, a seedy trade is emerging in which poor women risk their lives, often for a pittance and for the benefit of richer women.

Professor Grudzinskas argues that the long-term solution is to pay donors, and that egg-sharing is already payment in kind.

“Altruism hasn’t worked but the financial incentive does,” he says.

The other solution would be for more women to accept — The Independent Discussion on this Editorial item Disclaimer: These are Internet generated discussion threads for which the The Statesman has no responsibility.

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