American women sell ova to pay credit card debts

Washington, June 26 (UNI) Young American women, particularly students, who are neck-deep in credit card debt or student loans, have found a new way of paying off their bills--donating their ovum.

The idea of selling ova to clear loans is catching on fast and two sisters, themselves donors, have started an agency to recruit other donors and match them with patients. The sisters have already recruited a few of their friends and are actively looking for more donors, according to a Boston Globe report.

The report says a Boston-based couple paid Jamie Galbraith, 27, a mother of two children 15,000 dollars for donating her ovum. All she did was spent 45 minutes at a fertility clinic to donate her eggs.

She lives in Michigan and she was paid airfare, hotel charges and daily allowances to come to Massachusetts and to her clients' fertility clinic for the operation. This is her fourth procedure in three years and has another scheduled for July in New Jersey, the report added.

Galbraith has spent so much time in these clinics because she needed to raise a down payment for a house and relieve a loan of 14,000 dollars she had borrowed to pay the University of Phoenix online where she is studying for a bachelor's degree in business.

Galbraith's is in business because she is attractive, has healthy children and due to her track record as a donor. Each of her three prior donations resulted in an offspring among 40-year-old childless couples. So her price climbed from 5,000 dollars to 8,000 to 15,000.

This business is so attractive that Galbraith and her sister, a nursing student in Illinois who is also a donor, are starting their own agency to recruit other donors, the Globe report said.

And they know where to look, college towns, young, SAT-tested debt-ridden women. They can be recruited through school newspaper ads, websites and photocopied fliers stapled to trees. The ads probably won't mention the medical and psychological screenings or injecting hormones. They only mention families in need. And they promise cash.

''That's why it tempting,'' Galbraith was quoted as saying.

She said if they can squeeze in 10,000 dollars in a couple of months, that's good money.

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