The Commodification of Motherhood Starts at HBS

As more HBS women freeze their eggs, the expanding trade in fertility and surrogacy forces the question: should everything be for sale?

Amid the mind-numbing scroll of my Instagram algorithm, an advertisement began appearing with disquieting regularity.

$250,000 Opportunity — Chinese Egg Donor.

Mandatory requirements: Chinese ethnicity. Ages 21–28. 5’5” or taller. Good physical health.

The typography: restrained; the palette: soothing; the language: transactional. It read like a casting call drafted by a hedge fund. For a moment—long enough to embarrass myself—I calculated what $250,000 might do for my HBS tuition.  Although the thought evaporated quickly, the strangeness of seeing my demographic profile reduced to a premium asset class lingered unpleasantly. Height: monetizable; Ethnicity: scarce; Age: depreciating. 

The ad felt somewhat dystopian: a world in which reproduction is a logistical supply chain with targeted sourcing.

The presence of the reproductive industry is only exacerbated at HBS. In our LEAD Class, we envisioned what our lives would be like in ten years. For many of the women, although our ten-year goals included job promotions, funds raised, and empires toppled, our conversations also veered compulsively and strategically toward motherhood. When would we try? With whom? What if we couldn’t?

A staggering ninety-six percent of HBS women surveyed have thought about freezing their eggs. Among this ninety-six percent, forty-three percent are planning to freeze them or already have, with another third considering it. 

In conversations with these 96% of HBS women, their reasoning is stubbornly practical. Our twenties and early thirties have been consumed by exams, promotions, and relocations. Many have not found partners they would trust with the raising of a child. Others have faced health concerns that make waiting feel risky. In the meantime, egg freezing has become almost ordinary—tucked into corporate benefits packages and presented on clinic websites in soft, pastel tones that make the injections look gentle, even routine.

***

So what, exactly, does it cost to freeze your eggs in this market?

According to FertilityIQ, a single cycle of egg freezing typically costs between $10,000 and $15,000 for the procedure itself—monitoring appointments, the retrieval, anesthesia, and the lab work required to freeze the eggs. Fertility medications, administered over roughly two weeks, add another $3,000 to $6,000, depending on dosage and how the body responds. The upfront total for one cycle can approach $25,000.

And one cycle is often not enough.

Physicians frequently recommend multiple retrievals to bank a meaningful number of eggs, particularly for women freezing in their mid- to late-thirties. Two cycles can bring the total near $50,000; three move beyond that. One woman I spoke with, who has endometriosis, underwent five.

There are also the quieter, ongoing costs. Storage typically runs $500 to $1,000 per year. If the eggs are eventually thawed and used, the expenses resume: fertilization through IVF, embryo culture, possible genetic testing, and transfer—often another $10,000 to $20,000 or more.

By the time a pregnancy is attempted, the cost can edge into six figures. And that is before accounting for the physical toll of repeated hormone cycles and procedures, and the emotional weight of waiting to see whether the investment will pay off.

***

If freezing your eggs is expensive, selling your eggs is revealing.

The compensation offered to a donor is not merely a transaction but an unflinching assessment of which human characteristics the market has decided to prize. After the $250,000 advertisement began appearing in my Instagram algorithm, I began investigating the pricing structures of elite fertility agencies and discovered a system that operates on a type of biological surge pricing—one that fertility industry observers have described as compensating for the "four E's": ethnicity, education, esthetics, and experience (Science Direct). 

A routine search shows that first-time egg donors in the United States typically receive between five and fifteen thousand dollars per cycle. At boutique agencies, where educational pedigree, test scores, ethnic background, or athletic achievements are prominently featured, compensation rises considerably. Fifty-thousand-dollar donations are not unknown. The $250,000 advertisement was not a fantasy for some sub-groups. Scarcity commands value. So does pedigree.

According to data compiled by FertilityIQ and Science Direct, donor compensation follows a distinct hierarchy. The following table illustrates how the "four E's" framework translates into actual market pricing.

Category	Compensation Range (Per Cycle)	Market Value Breakdown
Base Compensation	$5,000–$15,000	The baseline for physical health and anonymity. This is the entry-level price for physiological labor and medical risk of the procedure.
Ethnicity	+$5,000–$100,000+	Whiteness is generally treated as the default, commanding little to no premium. Asian donors—particularly those of Chinese, Indian, or Korean descent—receive significant premiums, driven by perceived scarcity and demand from affluent international clients. Jewish donors are frequently sought for genetic matching. The $250,000 advertisement for a Chinese donor represented an extreme expression of this ethnic premium.
Education	+$3,000–$20,000	An Ivy League or comparable university affiliation is not merely an institutional detail; it is a twenty-thousand-dollar line item. High standardized test scores, graduate degrees, or attendance at elite international universities can double or triple the base compensation. The implied value proposition is explicit: the promise of cognitive aptitude.
Esthetics	+$2,000–$10,000	National-level athletic achievement, conservatory-level musical training, or the possession of a highly specific physical trait—five-foot-ten or taller for men, five-foot-five or taller for women, particular eye color—adds measurable value. It marks the difference between a functional donor and a designer one.
Experience	+$2,000–$15,000	Employment at a major technology firm, a prestigious consulting practice, or an investment bank signals ambition and professional success, further inflating the donor's market price.

And what happens to the children conceived through payments for genetic material? The survey conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics, “How Do Individuals Who Were Conceived Through the Use of Donor Technologies Feel About the Nature of Their Conception?”, suggests the answer is complicated and often painful. Among 143 adults conceived via donor sperm or eggs, roughly 85 percent reported a significant shift in their sense of identity upon learning how they were conceived, and nearly three-quarters said they thought about it frequently. About half sought counseling to process the discovery, and 62 percent expressed discomfort with the buying and selling of reproductive material. The study’s authors argue that donor conception can unsettle a person’s sense of self in lasting ways, underscoring the ethical stakes of a marketplace that treats genetic origins as something that can be priced and purchased.

***

The unintended consequence of this hyper-financialized marketplace is the creation of a parallel, unregulated, and deeply sinister underground economy. The same logic that assigns premiums to specific, desirable traits generates a demand that unscrupulous actors will seek to satisfy by any means necessary. This is not a distant or hypothetical danger.

In February 2025, the Human Rights Research Center documented the rescue of three Thai women from a human egg trafficking operation in the country of Georgia. These women were not recruited by boutique agencies with promises of life-changing compensation. Instead, they had responded to a deceptive online job advertisement offering a monthly salary of just over seven hundred dollars and an all-expenses-paid trip for what they believed was legitimate surrogacy work only to be trapped upon arrival with their body parts harvested. This is the farthest end of the spectrum, a place where the suggested language of "donation" and the prestige of the "four E's" dissolve entirely, leaving only the brutal reality of reproductive exploitation. The existence of such a black market is the horrifying conclusion of a system that has learned to assign a price to every aspect of a person.

***

The ethical debate surrounding the reproductive market is further complicated when the conversation turns to surrogacy. 

The idea of another woman carrying a child on my behalf feels uncomfortably close to renting a body. The term “gestational carrier” feels deeply impersonal with the antiseptic ring of a shipping label. The ethical concerns are familiar: economic coercion, class asymmetry, cross-border arrangements that mirror global inequality. If my classmates or I will have the means to hire surrogates, who are the women who will agree to carry our children—and what alternatives do they have?

However, further scrutiny obfuscates moral clarity. For the woman who lost her uterus to cancer or the gay couple for whom biology otherwise forecloses the possibility of a biological child, surrogacy is not indulgence but necessity. If autonomy is the principle, does it not extend to the surrogates who consent as well as to the intended parents who hope? Is it patronizing to assume all surrogates do not enjoy their profession? Even adoption, often invoked as the moral corrective, is shaped by scarcity and inequity. Who are we to say that surrogacy is unethical as a blanket statement?

***

Income complicates the ethics too. 

Over ninety percent of HBS women surveyed said they would not want to sell their eggs. Almost no one would donate for free. Eighty percent of HBS women surveyed view surrogacy as ethical but nobody would consider being a surrogate. We are willing to purchase assistance from the market, but reluctant to become inventory within it. Many of my classmates will graduate into high-paying jobs with good medical benefits. If we pursue egg freezing, IVF, or surrogacy, we will likely do so as buyers, not suppliers. It is easier to defend a system when you are the client rather than the commodity. If selling eggs feels distasteful when imagined as something we might do for money, why does purchasing them feel more defensible? Does our comfort depend on assuming we will never need to sell?

Fiction pushes the logic further. In Kirino Natsuo’s novel Swallows, surrogacy and egg donation are rendered with clinical bleakness. Bodies are appraised; traits are catalogued; women are valued according to reproductive utility. The parallels to prostitution are explicit. The novel suggests that once reproduction is commodified, it absorbs the market’s logic: comparison, hierarchy, price differentiation. Certain features command premiums. High test scores become bargaining chips. A womb, like any scarce resource, acquires a rate. The question is not whether everything is for sale—it is. 

The question is whether it should be.

The Instagram advertisement did not invent this logic. It simply made it visible.

***

Just as I was losing hope in this uneasy landscape, I discovered the startup Cofertility, which came to HBS to speak during the women’s health conference. Cofertility does not position itself as another entrant in the egg-freezing marketplace. It presents itself as an attempt to redesign the market altogether. Its premise is disarmingly simple. Instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars to freeze their eggs, women can freeze for free if they agree to donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents. The company calls this the “split model” to address the core unfairness in the reproductive market of access and alignment.

Lauren Makler, Cofertility’s co-founder, described to me what she sees as the industry’s central distortion (Halle Tecco, [MBA ‘11], is Cofertility’s other co-founder). The optimal biological window for freezing eggs tends to coincide with a period of relative financial precarity. Women in technology, medicine, finance, and startups, ambitious and early in their careers, confront a stark asymmetry between fertility and liquidity. Other women will never make enough money to afford these services in the traditional reproductive market. The procedure works best when they can least afford it. Optionality, in practice, becomes income contingent. Cofertility’s ambition is to correct that imbalance.

Makler describes the existing fertility marketplace as structurally misaligned. Intended parents often pay more for certain donor characteristics; compensation rises, and preference hardens into price. Traits begin to resemble line items. Cofertility removes direct cash payments to donors altogether, instead covering the cost of retrieval and providing up to ten years of storage for the donor’s own eggs. 

The structure is intentional. By removing direct payment, the company seeks to mitigate the sense of commodification noted earlier—and, in turn, the psychological strain reported by some donor-conceived children—recasting the exchange not as the purchase of genetics but as a reciprocal arrangement from which both parties derive benefit.

The company also limits each donor to three recipient families, far fewer than many traditional agencies, and allows for varying degrees of openness between donors and intended parents. Matching has the possibility of contact if both parties desire it.

When I asked her about risk-sharing, Makler’s answer was open, pragmatic, and intentional. Candidates undergo extensive screening, including ovarian reserve testing and repeated monitoring, to determine whether they are strong clinical candidates. If a cycle yields only a small number of eggs, the donor may keep them all. For women who do not qualify for the split program, Cofertility offers a parallel “Keep” pathway, connecting them to financing options and reduced storage costs. “The aim,” she said, “is not to maximize donation but to expand access while maintaining guardrails.”

Looking ahead a decade, Makler’s vision of success is that “any woman would have access to egg freezing at any age and that the decision would cease to function as a luxury good.” Donation would remain part of the ecosystem but bound by clearer limits and greater transparency. The measure of success would be tangible: live births, satisfied families, and a business model that sustains itself without amplifying inequity.

In a reproductive economy frequently organized around tiered pricing and tacit hierarchies, Cofertility is wagering that structural redesign can recalibrate the moral arithmetic. Whether that wager succeeds will depend not only on market demand but on whether its underlying premise holds: that fairness can be engineered. So far, this seems to be working. Cofertility is making revenue and has received $16M in funding. As I am writing this article, I find myself cautiously optimistic about what this means for the reproductive industry.

***

I am still grappling with my own stance on the ethics of this industry. However, I know that I will freeze my eggs. The decision feels less ideological than a hedge against a timeline that may not cooperate. It is an investment in optionality, the same logic that animates retirement accounts and diversified portfolios. Egg freezing does not remove me from this economy. It confirms my participation in it.

I can critique the commodification of gametes and still feel the pull of wanting biological children. I want to see my family’s eyebrows reappear on a small, unfamiliar face. That desire coexists with discomfort. It coexists with the knowledge that the system making such continuity possible is stratified and priced.

The Instagram ad still appears between puppies and trench coats. It no longer shocks me; it unsettles me more quietly. Fertility has become another domain of optimization—extended, insured, outsourced. It can be monetized or medicalized, donated or purchased, framed as empowerment or extraction.

I tell myself that I am preserving my future instead of selling it. Whether that distinction is morally decisive—or merely comforting—is a question I suspect I will continue to ask long after the algorithm stops serving me ads. In the meantime, the market hums along. Somewhere, an algorithm continues to infer that part of my body might be worth $250,000.

Ruby Liu (MBA ‘27) has lived in every region of the US, but says that she’s from Ohio and Texas. She graduated from UT Austin with a bachelors and masters degree in Accounting. Prior to HBS, she worked in Seattle, WA with several startups, nonprofits, and at Deloitte. Her writing has been featured in several literary journals including BarBar Literary Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Juhea Kim’s now discontinued Peaceful Dumpling. Outside of work, Ruby enjoys reviewing books on instagram (@rubyrecreads), nature walks, and fun earrings.