An APR Notebook Preview—
PAT DUGGINS-- It looks like the subject of in vitro fertilization will figure prominently in Alabama's election in 2026 an attorney who specializes in helping infertile couples through IVF wants to be on the Alabama Supreme Court and a former high court and a former High Court Justice who helped write Alabama's controversial frozen embryos are children. Ruling wants to be attorney general. That's why I wanted to talk with University of Alabama Professor Diane Tober. She wrote the book “Eggonomics.” It's about the darker side of infertility. Tober writes about young women, sometimes under financial pressure, who undergo something very close to surgery to provide human eggs to wealthy and infertile couples who want to have families. Tober was also front and center in the fight in the Alabama legislature to protect fertility clinics after the embryos are children ruling by the State's highest court. I asked Tober if it struck her as funny that Alabama would safeguard IVF considering we're a pro-life state.
DIANE TOBER-- No, no, it doesn't. Because when I was at the Montgomery hearings, the legislative hearings, trying to look at the impact the legislation surrounding the IVF, the fetal personhood, or embryo personhood bill, most of the women that were in there, testifying or in support of the bill to allow IVF to occur in Alabama. And most of the you know, you know, when you're at a legislative hearing, you get all these supporters. You might have hundreds of supporters, you know, on one side or another. So the room was filled with Alabama women, predominantly conservative, conservative Alabama women who want the rights to create a family, however, they need to do it. But they want their rights to have a child right, and if they need donor egg to not have IVF available, for example, would be truly devastating for these for the people who who rely on donor eggs to have a child.
PAT--Your book really does a nice job of comparing how the United States handles egg donations compared to Spain, and it covers a lot of territory. But if you were to pick one thing that the United States does differently compared to how the Spanish handle it? What would that be?
DIANE-- Yeah, good question. So, Spain has a more regulated system when it comes to egg donation, and you and the United States has a very unregulated, or spottily regulated system. And Spain has also instituted a registry, a donor registry, which tracks the number of cycles a donor does. It tracks where the eggs go. And if it's found that any of the children born from her eggs have a medical condition that's can be genetically linked to the donor, they have a system where they where the clinic can go back and contact the intended parents and say, hey, look, your donor has this heart condition, you know, in her genetic code, and so therefore some of the offspring from this donor have the same heart condition, you might want to get your child checked. And then they, they pull the donor from the from not being able to donate anymore. So it's in Spain, they stop the donor at either six cycles or six live births in a geographic area. And they also, you know, have a way of tracking medically, at least, the least for the donor conceived people, they don't necessarily track donor health yet, which I wish they would, but they, but they at least have a registry to stop the donors from going over six donation cycles. And in the United States, I've seen donors do quite a number. Of donors in my study have done between 10 and 19 donation cycles, and that is a lot to put your body through. Even, you know, the three to six times that the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends.
PAT-- Did I read right that in the United States, parents can actually say, well, we like blonde hair, blue eye, high cheekbones, and the Spanish are like, what?
DIANE-- Exactly. Yes, so, and that's another thing that you told me, I could always say one, but that would be two. But yes, in the night in the United States, we have a very tiered market in human eggs because it's very consumer driven. And so, you know, I'm an intended parent. I can go through an egg donation agency or a clinic website. I can pick my donor, and I can choose sort of what kinds of traits I want. I want her to have a Harvard education, for example. I want blonde hair, blue eyes I want, or I want Asian, or I want, you know, her to be a volleyball player, or any of these things. And so the the means of selection being so, so consumer driven also drives this market with some donors get paid dramatically more. Than others based on these traits, which obviously has these sort of Neo eugenic overtones that make us, that make some of us feel a little uncomfortable. And it's also a very commercialized market. In Spain, it still has some commercial elements, but it's still more along the lines of medical practice. So the clinics determine the donor recipient matching based upon phenotypic similarity. Now, it's not a perfect system, so intended parents have no say over the donor that they that they get matched with. This it's supposed to only be done based on how well they resemble one another, but you know, and donors are all compensated the same, so it's more egalitarian in that way. But there's also other other aspects, like in Spain, they they have mandatory anonymity, so the donor and recipient must remain anonymous to each other in perpetuity.
PAT—You can listen to my complete conversation with Diane Tober, author of the book ““Eggonomics” ,” about the darker side of infertility. It's tonight's premiere of APR notebook at 7pm on Alabama Public Radio. You it and coming up on future shows. For example, I'll talk with Irina zerba, who lives part time in Huntsville and part time in her hometown in Ukraine. She founded a company that makes jigsaw puzzles with images of Ukrainian cultural landmarks destroyed in the war with Russia. And then there's my talk with former NASA astronaut Jim Voss, who hails from Opelika. All of that and more on APR notebook premiering tonight at 7pm on Alabama Public Radio. I'll see you then.
