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Danes offered sunny holiday for egg donation

The Local Denmark
The Local Denmark - [email protected]
Danes offered sunny holiday for egg donation
Danish company's offer: Donate your eggs and get a 'wellness holiday'. Photo: Colourbox

The world's largest sperm bank is circumventing Denmark's "absurd" and "discriminatory" laws on egg donation by paying for trips abroad.

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Donate your eggs and get a tropical vacation and economic compensation. That’s the offer to Danish women from the Copenhagen-based Cryos International Sperm Bank. 
 
Jyllands-Posten reported on Saturday that Cryos has established a foreign subsidiary allowing it to bypass Danish law, which does not allow for the sell of donor eggs.
 
Danish women can donate their eggs either anonymously or to a specific person they want to help. Danish women can receive a maximum of 2,400 kroner in compensation for the treatments leading to the donation, but unlike with male sperm donors, the women are not paid directly for the eggs. 
 
Until recently, Danish women could only receive 500 kroner in compensation. In other EU countries, that figure is much higher. In Sweden, women can receive nearly 9,000 kroner while in Spain the amount is 900 euro, or 6,700 kroner. 
 
Cryos now plans to offer Danish women all-expenses-paid ‘wellness holidays’ to donate their eggs at fertility clinics in destinations such as Spain, Greece and Cyprus. Depending on the destination, women can earn up to 11,000 kroner. 
 
The head of Cryos, Ole Schou, told Jyllands-Posten that not only will his company richly compensate women for their egg donation, it will also offer them the opportunity to store their own eggs in foreign clinics should they wish to use them 10-15 years down the road. 
 
“I don’t see anything unethical in it. The Danish rules are absurd and detrimental and on top of that it is discriminatory that here [in Denmark] you can sell sperm but not eggs,” Schou said. 
 
He said that Cryos , which is the world’s largest sperm bank, has been unsuccessfully lobbying for years to get Danish egg donation rules changed. 
 
With those efforts yet to pay off, Schou said the company was forced to open a foreign subsidiary. 
 
“We want to help the childless, but we are also a private company and therefore we need to sell eggs in order to make money. And if we can’t do it in Denmark, they we have to do it somewhere else,” he said. 
 
 

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