Jennifer Lahl and The Center for Bioethics and Culture, producers of the award-winning Eggsploitation (2010, 2013), Anonymous Father’s Day (2011), and Breeders: A Subclass of Women? (2014), announce the release of their new documentary short, Eggsploitation: Maggie’s Story.

Eggsploitation: Maggie’s Story follows one woman’s journey of learning about “helping” others have a child they desperately want, what she discovered in becoming an egg donor, and the consequences that followed. Maggie was told how special she was, but was never informed of the risks egg donation posed to her own health and wellbeing. She was used repeatedly for others’ gain, but when things turned bad, she was left on her own to navigate tests, treatments, surgeries, and an unknown prognosis. Maggie’s harrowing story shows how the medical professionals she trusted ignored abnormal health signals along the way, all for their own financial profit. Sadly, Maggie joins the ranks of other young women harmed and hurt by egg “donation,” and left forgotten.

In all the slick marketing around egg donation there is never any mention of the real and serious potential health risks to the young women who serve as compensated donors. One of the many glaring, dirty little secrets is that there has never been a single major, peer-reviewed, long-term study of the otherwise healthy young women who are enticed with large sums of money to sell their eggs to make the dreams of others come true.

Janice Raymond, Ph.D., author of Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and the Battle over Women’s Freedom and Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says Maggie’s Story is “a personal story that is much larger than one woman’s experience. Maggie serves as a warning to all of us concerned about the harm done to women through egg donation. An urgently needed and articulate indictment of the world of eggsploitation.”

Feminist activist Melinda Tankard Reist calls out the multi-billion dollar infertility industry stating, “Many others in the fertility industry dismiss the stories in Eggsploitation as being insignificant. They want to reduce women’s experiences to the lesser categories of ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘scare tactics’ – ironically, using their own reassuring anecdotal evidence that they have never personally seen a donor die or develop cancer.”

For more information, please visit https://www.cbc-network.org/maggie/

Eggsploitation: Maggie’s Story is available on demand worldwide at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/maggie

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