Auction site shakes up fertility business

By Bruce Horovitz, USA TODAY

Beautiful women often surround Ron Harris.

The international fashion photographer Monday will launch a Web site from his Malibu home that virtually assures even more will come knocking: It will auction ovarian eggs for up to $150,000 from some of the sexy models and actresses that he photographs.

The Web site: http://www.ronsangels.com/

Two of the models gave exclusive interviews to USA TODAY. Each is a struggling actress in southern California. "I'd rather do this than do Playboy or Penthouse," says Misty-Lee McFern, 26, who lives in Arcadia, Calif. She's asking $50,000 for her eggs.

But one model is requesting $150,000 for her eggs -- about 50 times more than the conventional $3,000 that egg donors are paid by fertility clinic clients.

Why such steep price tags? Well, go check out the Web site at http://www.ronsangels.com/. Sound familiar? Harris says he named it after the hormone-laced TV show from the 1970s, Charlie's Angels.

But critics smell the devil in it.

"This is a troubling example of how big bucks and flat-out commercialism dominate a field where there are so many vulnerable people," says Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., author of the nation's only federal law that regulates fertility clinics. "I'll be looking into this one." The current law, passed in 1992, sets fertility lab standards. It does not address moral issues.

Selling eggs and sperm online isn't new. Fertility clinics and individuals have done it for years. What's new, critics say, is the blatant if not misguided message of the Web site: Beautiful eggs are available strictly to people who are willing to spend an ungodly sum for them.

Ronsangels.com may be the Web site that turns the nation's multibillion-dollar fertility business on its head. It may lead to much tougher national regulation of the fertility industry. And it just may force an Internet-obsessed society to finally sit down and ask itself: Where is the Internet taking us?

This is about human need. And human greed. It is about the future of human breeding at the beginning of a new millennium. Most of all, it's about our future: our children.

An attractive child. It's what few parents admit they long for -- some perhaps as much as they want a healthy child. But if the woman is infertile, as 6.1 million American women are, how can one achieve this?

Enter Harris. He has no medical background. But he formerly bred Arabian horses that he sold for up to $200,000 each. Now, he has devised an apparently legal way to help couples boost their odds of having attractive children: an egg auction from stunning models and struggling actresses on his Web site.

The models -- most of whom he has photographed for magazines or TV shows in the past -- get 100% of the winning bids. Then Harris tacks on an additional 20%, paid for by the bidders, as his fee.

"We bid for everything else in this society -- why not eggs?" asks Harris, 66, a father of three and grandfather of three who has married and divorced four times. "It's not like someone is dying and you're bidding for somebody else's kidney."

Over the next year, Harris figures his site can sell upward of $2 million worth of eggs, garnering him a take of about $400,000. In order to find out more detailed information on the models -- including their ages and even their specific body measurements -- people who visit the Web site must pay a $24.95 monthly fee.

He knows beauty

"What mother wants an ugly child?" Harris asks.

Certainly, Harris does know a thing or two about beauty. He's been photographing models for nearly 40 years, and he says his portfolio includes photos he's taken of models Lauren Hutton and Cybill Shepherd.

His work has appeared on the covers of Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan magazines. In the 1980s, he created and produced the best-selling exercise video, Aerobicise and The 20 Minute Workout, one of the first TV shows featuring aerobic exercise. More recently, he has produced and directed several TV specials for Playboy Television.

Harris believes that beauty, not brains, leads most people to live a successful life. "Beauty is more than skin deep," he says. "It shows healthiness and longevity and opportunity."

His Web site, he says, will put beautiful girls in touch with people who "need" their eggs. "Genetically modified eggs will be the story of the next decade," he says. "This is where the action is."

But critics say the Web site looks more akin to a porno site than a place to purchase ovarian eggs. Click on the photo of the first sultry model holding a yellow rose near her breast, and photos of several other models flash on the screen.

One toothy model, who was listed as being 18 years old late last week, is suddenly relisted this week at age 20. Another redheaded model is gone from the site altogether. "She was unstable," explains Harris, declining to define what he means by that.

Each model has set a price for her eggs -- from $15,000 to $150,000.

Critics have reservations

"He's basically operating a dating service that uses eggs," says Robert Stillman, medical director of the Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, Md.

"What he's really saying is: Come to my site and buy a nice, beautiful child," says George Annas, a professor of health law at Boston University who sits on the ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. "Not only is it ethically ludicrous, but the fact is, no kid's going to look like the model's picture."

While some fertility experts say these eggs may slightly boost the odds of bearing attractive children, there are no guarantees. "You don't want to see the models," says Annas. "You want to see pictures of their parents."

Officials in the fertility industry are outraged. "This kind of business venture could eventually put an end to egg donations as an option for all folks," says Diane Aronson, executive director of Resolve, a national infertility trade group.

Fertility clinic directors are appalled. "This is deplorable, unethical and speaks only the basest of human desires," Stillman says. "This speaks of human genetic engineering like the Nazis."

But apparently it's legal.

Brainchild: Fashion photographer Ron Harris is launching a Web site Monday to sell models' ovarian eggs (AP).

"From the point of view of the laws we enforce, there is nothing per se illegal about this," says Rich Cleland, an attorney in the advertising practices division of the Federal Trade Commission.

But consumers beware, advises Chris Painter, who oversees the computer crime coordinating unit for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles. "When you have large transactions of this kind conducted over the Internet, there may be fraud," he warns.

So far, the site has made no transactions. Harris says serious clients have the option of meeting the models first.

One southern California woman who stumbled across it already has made a $42,000 bid for one of the model's eggs.

"The whole point of all this is to find an egg donor who looks like me," says Beth, a 40-year-old TV show producer, who requested that her last name not be used. "That way, I might never have to explain the fact that I used someone else's eggs."

She doesn't object to the relatively steep price tag. "Getting the most for your eggs seems to be reasonable," she says. "It's better than prostitution."

But she's hesitant to meet the model in person. "Maybe through a one-way mirror or in a video," she says. "I just don't want her showing up at my door."

Why sell your eggs?

Neither of the models who spoke to USA TODAY was fully aware of, nor particularly interested in, the details of how the egg transfer would work. (Egg donations typically require several weeks of hormone injections and a surgical procedure to remove 8 to 10 eggs. The eggs eventually are mixed in a petri dish with sperm before being implanted into the infertile woman.)

Prior to speaking to USA TODAY, neither model had yet informed her gynecologist of her plans.

That's a big mistake because the occasional risks of donating eggs can include anything from infertility to possible death, Aronson says. "These women need to be fully informed of the risks."

But clearly, the models are themselves risk-takers.

If Nicole Newman looks slightly familiar, there's a reason for that. During the credits to the TV drama Homicide, she plays the part of a dead body.

"It's a tough business," she explains. "You take what you can get."

At 25, she's studying musical theater at Santa Monica College. And she hopes to attend either University of Southern California or University of California at Los Angeles next year. The way she figures it, auctioning off her eggs could pay for her college. "I won't have to call home and ask for money any more," she says.

That's why she's set the price for her eggs at $30,000. She figure's it will cost about $28,000 a year for her college expenses. And if she auctions her eggs annually for four years, her college is paid for.

Newman says she's never done any drugs. She doesn't smoke. And she doesn't drink. She's never been married and recently broke up with her boyfriend. "My only bad habit," she says, "is I exercise too much."

Then, there's McFern, who says she prefers the big paycheck from auctioning her eggs rather than to posing nude in men's magazines, which she has never done. She wants $50,000 for her eggs because "I'd like to have my own home," she says. "I don't want to be in an apartment in California all my life."

For an actress with no full-time work, life isn't easy. She recently placed fourth in an Hawaiian Tropic beauty pageant. For her time and trouble, she made $100. "That paid for the gas to get there -- and the swimsuit."

McFern, who has a five-year-old daughter, recently auditioned to appear on The Young and the Restless. She's also studying speech communications at California State University at Los Angeles.

Her husband, a computer programmer, approves of her decision to auction her eggs. "My husband says one reason he married me is because I have great genes," says McFern, who adds she's never had any figure-enhancing plastic surgery and doesn't so much as dye her hair.

"I've never even had chicken pox, mumps or measles," she says. "Don't you think those are pretty good genes to pass along?"

As for Harris, well, he has plans to soon start selling sperm from male models on his Web site -- at $10,000 to $50,000 each. And he hopes to soon run paid advertising on the site.

Harris acknowledges there are no minority models on his Web site. He says that's because he hasn't worked with many. "I'm not trying to do a white supremacist thing," he says.

Harris, who says he stays in shape by running 20 miles every week, expects others to quickly set up Web sites that look like his.

"I may be the first, but there will be 500 sites like mine tomorrow," Harris says. "I plan to be in business a long, long time," he says, stops, then continues, "unless they change the laws and shut me down."