Egg donation advertisements: addressing the regulatory gap

Egg donation is a procedure that is powerfully advertised as a beneficial experience with limited mention of the associated risks. Egg donor recruitment advertisements target young and financially insecure women and can serve as a catalyst for interest in egg donation. In the absence of explicit egg donation advertisement regulations and without counterbalancing information from other sources, potential donors may not be able to recognize how advertisements can be misleading. In this paper, we enumerate two types of misleading information in egg donor recruitment advertisements that can influence the decision to donate that might not exist otherwise: (1) the focus on financial benefits and (2) the minimization of health risks. We draw upon existing Federal Drug Administration and Federal Trade Commission regulations that govern other types of medical advertisements and demonstrate their suitability to govern egg donor recruitment advertisements. We conclude that similar regulations could address the regulatory gap in which egg donation advertisements are situated by ensuring that information is balanced and not overly persuasive, thus better protecting the autonomy of egg donors.