Eggonomics with Diane Tober

My guest today is Diane Tober, an Associate Professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. She is a medical anthropologist with a focus on biocultural aspects of health, gender and sexuality, the commodification of the body, science and technology studies, bioethics, and social and reproductive justice. She has been conducting research exploring egg donors’ decisions and experiences within the global market for human eggs since 2013. She joins us today to discuss her recent book, Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them (Routledge 2024). This episode is co-hosted by UVA Law 2Ls, Rachel Duffy and Rachel Greenbaum.

Show Notes

About Diane Tober

About Kim Krawiec

About Rachel Duffy

About Rachel Greenbaum

Diane Tober, Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply Them (Routledge 2024)

Kimberly D. Krawiec, Gametes: Commodification and The Fertility Industry, in Routledge Handbook of Commodification, Routledge, 278–289 (1 ed. 2023).

Krawiec, Kimberly D. "Markets, repugnance, and externalities." Journal of Institutional Economics 19.6 (2023): 944-955.

Transcript

[00:00] Diane Tober: I remember one time at a conference, a reproductive medicine conference, and I was walking up and down the aisles and there was a VIP donor in the exhibit hall. And there was one VIP donor station, right? And they had this donor standing on a pedestal, you know, on the video screen, dressed in a camisole and just leggings, you know, and very tight form fitting, her hair all done up, makeup all done up, and rotating on this pedestal 360, so you can see every inch and aspect of her body on this platform. And it was very much a marketing towards beauty, towards perfection, towards being a vip, right? And they had this whole glossy catalog that looked like a Cosmopolitan magazine, right? It very much looked like Cosmo. The poofy hair, the modeling shots, and so on.

[00:55] Kim Krawiec: Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Traits Podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravik.

[01:11] My guest today is Diane Tober, an associate professor at the University of Alabama Department of Anthropology and Institute for Social Science Research. She is a medical anthropologist with a focus on biocultural aspects of health, gender and sexuality, the commodification of the body, science and technology studies, bioethics and social and reproductive justice. She has been conducting research exploring egg donors, decisions and experiences within the global market for human eggs since 2013. She joins us today to discuss her recent book.

[01:47] The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors who Supply Them.

[01:57] Hi, guys. Thanks for joining me today.

[01:59] Rachel Duffy: Hi, thanks so much, Kim. Really excited to start this podcast today.

[02:04] Kim Krawiec: Great. Well, why don't we start by having both of you introduce yourselves to our audience?

[02:09] Rachel Greenbaum: Hi, my name is Rachel Greenbaum. I'm a second year at the University of Virginia School of Law. And I'm excited to be here and get a deeper dive into taboo trees in general, especially with my very niche interest in the egg trade here.

[02:24] Rachel Duffy: I'm Rachel duffy. I'm also 2L at UVA Law, and I'm really excited to talk more about this topic today. Egg donation is also something I've been curious about for a long time, given that I'm in in law school and I don't know if I will have children, but it's something that has just really interested me as maybe a possibility later on in my career. So very excited to learn more today with Diane.

[02:48] Kim Krawiec: Okay, so both of you volunteered to be co hosts for this episode, and you both mentioned that you've been interested in egg donation for a while. Tell me a little bit more about why you were interested in being the host for this episode specifically, I'm just.

[03:05] Rachel Greenbaum: Really interested in this as. As a person of mixed race, I get targeted ads for both Asian eggs and Jewish eggs. And it was really interesting to kind of see, like, the legality behind that and what's happening behind closed doors, because I never really inquired any further than that. So when I saw this month was one of the options, I thought was really interesting. Especially after going further into the readings, I have even more questions that I'm excited to ask.

[03:26] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, I'm. I'm excited to hear your conversation with her about that, because you are a combination of two desirable demographic groups, and so I'm interested to hear her take on what that means, if anything. Rachel Duffy, what about you?

[03:43] Rachel Duffy: Yeah, also very similarly to Rachel Greenbaum, I've received a lot of these ads on social media, and although I've never personally been interested in donating my eggs, this could change my mind. Good to learn more about it in detail. But again, with all these law firm things that were exposed to, all these discussions about freezing your eggs and alternative ways to start your family later on in your career, this is just a topic that's kind of been on my mind as I'm in my mid-20s, so something to think about and learn more about.

[04:12] Kim Krawiec: So, Rachel, is this, then, a topic that has been raised either among your friend group or actually by law firms that you're talking to?

[04:21] Rachel Duffy: Yeah, definitely. Some of the promotional materials I received over the recruiting process mentioned some of these. The firm that I'm going to. This is one of the things that they touted when I was making my decision, actually. And I think they have sessions about this kind of stuff when you actually start working there. And my friends and I have definitely talked about this. I have a lot of friends who are in medical school, and they're really up to date on all these sorts of things. And it's something that's almost casually discussed in a way that I don't think was very common a few decades ago. So it's. It's been interesting.

[04:53] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, for sure. That is really fascinating. Okay, so we have a lot of questions for Diane once she joins. You guys have questions, and your classmates have questions. What are some of the things that you're hoping to get out of the discussion with her today?

[05:09] Rachel Greenbaum: I'm hoping just to get more clarity on the process. I understand that it's a very hard topic to discuss, especially in a lot of different cultures. So it's very interesting to see the comparison in different countries, how this would pan out, or inapplicability of some of the suggestions in our current economy and the political environment that we're in.

[05:26] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, great. I. And so just to clarify, for readers who might not have read the book, the primary comparison in the book is between the United States and Spain. And so I'm sure we'll talk to her more about whatever differences exist between those two settings. Rachel Duffy, what about you?

[05:42] Rachel Duffy: Yeah, also same here. I had no sense of how much cultural interplay there was going to be when I chose this topic since we hadn't had the readings just yet. And, you know, given that Rachel Greenbaum and I are both mixed race, it's a very personally interesting topic. So looking forward to diving more deeply into that. And then again, that comparison between Spain and the United States, I'm curious to see if Diane has a preference between the two systems and just to get more clarity on what she thinks of both.

[06:12] Kim Krawiec: Okay, great. So anything else from either one of you that you are hoping to get out of today?

[06:19] Rachel Duffy: No, I'm looking forward to getting started.

[06:21] Kim Krawiec: Okay, let's join the others.

[06:27] Well, thanks for joining us today. We're so looking forward to this discussion.

[06:32] Rachel Greenbaum: Me too.

[06:33] Diane Tober: Thank you. Thanks for the invitation.

[06:35] Kim Krawiec: Well, and this is our final episode. So you're the grand finale for the season.

[06:40] Diane Tober: Well, I feel so privileged to have the final spot, the final say.

[06:45] Kim Krawiec: Oh, well, the privilege is all ours.

[06:48] Diane Tober: So I'm Diane Tober. I'm a medical anthropologist, received my PhD from University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco. And I'm currently associate professor at University of Alabama. And most of my research has to do with the medical markets and human eggs, sperm. And I'm also looking at uteruses at this point. And mostly one of some of the themes that I'm interested in have to do with bioethics, commodification of the body, and reproductive health. And I came to this research on egg donors. My earlier work had been on sperm donation and how people choose donors and how donors sort of participate and experience the process of controlled sexuality within the clinical setting. And later I came to the work on egg donors because there was some bills in the state of California where I lived at the time that were seeking to allow researchers to pay women for their eggs, but not looking at or even incorporating anything to follow up the women over time. So it was the eggs they wanted for research purposes, not research on egg donors. And so that seemed to me to be a perfect opportunity to do the kind of research on donors that had not yet been done.

[07:55] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, I actually remember when those Provisions were being debated. Great. Well, we are super excited to talk to you. I am going to turn you over to Rachel Duffy and Rachel Greenbaum. They're the co hosts for this episode and they basically run the show from here on out.

[08:11] Diane Tober: Sounds great. I look forward to it.

[08:13] Rachel Duffy: Hi, Diane. Thank you so much for joining us today. So we're going to start with a couple of questions from the both of us. They're going to be about mixed race donors. It's a topic that's really significant to each of us. I'll start with mine. So I can imagine that mixed race donors feel pressured to perform or emphasize certain parts of their heritage to better align with market preferences. How are mixed race donors racial and ethnic identities determined within donor databases? Are donors able to select their own identity fields, or are these decisions imposed by agencies primarily based on the donor's phenotype? This is something you alluded to for the Spanish system. You also imply that agencies like Asia Elite can cater to very specific racial criteria. On that note, are some mixed race donors treated as versatile matches, or does their racial ambiguity generally reduce their marketability?

[09:08] Diane Tober: I'll try to break that down. The answer is it's really a complicated system. So it's not either or. It just is very situational and depends on the clinic, on the agency, and on the individual donor. In most US Agencies and clinics, especially when you're talking about egg donation agencies, we're just sort of intermediaries between intended parents, clinics, and donors. In most agencies, and most donors tend to go through agencies, the donor fills out a profile and she selects the categories in terms of ancestral identity, ethnicity, hair color, eye color, et cetera. Now, most of these kinds of donor profiles are also curated after she fills it out by the clinic, by the agency recruiter, and so on, to try to construct a more marketable kind of language for the recipient or intended parents. Now, one donor I interviewed who was mixed race, Chinese, American.

[10:14] White father, Chinese mother. One of the things that she said to me is like when she was filling out the donor profile was, am I Chinese enough to put Asian? Am I Asian enough, or do I go under the Burnett category? So among some donors, there's a little bit of confusion of where do I put myself? Because as we know, ancestry, ethnicity, racial identities and so on are very complex and very few people or the majority of people don't necessarily neatly fit one category, Right? So people are often kind of checking one or more boxes, Right. And when it comes to marketing.

[10:55] For mixed race donors, depending upon, again, phenotype and Traits, they tend to be able to cross numerous categories and be able to be utilized by different groups of intended parents. So it really depends and especially in the agency realm, the marketability is very important. Also in egg banks you want, you want to get a donor who's going to be able to appeal to a wide range of people. The wider the range of people she can appeal to, the more income for the clinic or for the agency or for the egg bank, and also the more potential income for the donor. Now in Spain, as you alluded to, it's a very different system where it's all curated by the clinics, so they don't have those intermediary agencies like we do here. It's starting to develop there a little bit, but not like what we have here. And so also in Spain, since there's a flat rate for every donor, and here we have a tiered market where some people are paid more than others, it operates in a very different way.

[12:01] Rachel Duffy: Thank you so much, really appreciate your answer. I'm going to turn it over to Rachel Greenbaum now for her question.

[12:07] Rachel Greenbaum: Hi. Thank you. Rachel Duffy. So my question goes into how your book notes that clinics and agencies often offer higher compensation for specific ethnic or religious backgrounds, specifically Asian and Jewish backgrounds. One of the reasons I found this podcast topic intriguing was I often get targeted for ads for donating Asian and Jewish eggs. You argue that multi ethnic people are often undercompensated, but you also point out that niche racial combinations can be harder to find. This suggests that they are both under and overcompensated at the same time. Could you elaborate on this a little bit more?

[12:39] Diane Tober: The idea of undercompensated and over overcompensated, it's very situational dependent. For example, and a mixed race donor, Asian, Jewish, for example, donor who has, has particular academic degrees or goes to a particular university, she might be able to get more compensation than somebody who does not. Now anybody with any kind of Asian ancestry is going to automatically, for the most part, be put in sort of a, a higher compensation category, especially for East Asian, although for some reason Filipina and Thai, for example, Southeast Asian might be lower compensation. Jewish tends to be a little bit higher than for example some other ancestral groups like Hispanic, which are not necessarily a religious identity or an ethnic identity. So it really depends. It depends on education, it depends on hobbies, it depends on perceived attractiveness to the intended parents. So people who are considered to be more attractive by predominantly Euro American standards, but for Asian donors it would be by Asian standards. And so on, but people who perceive to be more attractive are often compensated higher than people who perceive to be less attractive. So again, the thing about the egg donation industry is it's very difficult to say it operates this way all the time because everything is situational dependent. And the level of compensation also relates to whether she's a proven donor. So if somebody has has a history of donating before and had successful pregnancies, her compensation is going to go up potentially by 5, $10,000.

[14:23] Rachel Greenbaum: Thank you. And transitioning out away from that. Our next question is going to be about your field work in Spain and the US and donor demographics. Tick us off. We're going to go over to Reid.

[14:34] Diane Tober: Hi, Diane. Thanks for coming to talk with us. I'm wondering how you settled on the.

[14:40] Speaker E: United States and Spain as focal points for your book.

[14:43] Diane Tober: Were those the places that got the most responses on the survey or did you choose them before that?

[14:49] Speaker E: What factors went into choosing them and.

[14:51] Diane Tober: Did you consider or reject any others? I chose those two settings long before I constructed the survey because I had to write a survey in Spanish. I'm not going to write a survey in Spanish unless I have the Spain site already set up. So the reason why I chose the United States and Spain is that these are the two primary markets for donor egg fertility treatment. Both US And Spain have a very high number of people coming to those countries for reproductive travel and also are two of the primary destinations and locations for fertility treatment with donor eggs. Another reason why I chose the United States and Spain is because they have two very different systems. The United States has more of this free market model and is relatively unregulated, whereas Spain has a more sort of defined market model, right, where things are restricted and is more highly regulated in terms of donor compensation, in terms of anonymity. And so I was very interested in how these two different.

[15:56] Very popular destinations, how these different regulations and practices, medically, legally, and so on, intersected with donors decisions and experiences. It made a perfect comparative type of setting or example because the two places are both very popular and also operate under completely different systems.

[16:21] Rachel Duffy: Thanks for your question, Reid. And next on this topic, we have a question from Kendall.

[16:27] Kim Krawiec: Hi, Diane. Thank you for joining us. So throughout chapter one of your book, you discuss the importance of proper terminology in this field. For example, you discuss the distinction between egg provider and egg donor and whether an egg donor is a patient or not. And I'm curious about what donors think about some of these distinctions and if they have opinions, how do you see them varying across the United States And Spain.

[16:46] Speaker F: Yeah.

[16:46] Diane Tober: Well, most egg donors call themselves egg donors. Some egg donors call themselves egg providers. So, again, I wish I had a definitive answer, but it does vary. The reason why I stick with the language of donor is because egg donation, kidney donation, sperm donation, it's all taking a cell from one body and putting it into something, another body, a cell or an organization. I think, as you've talked about throughout your course, from what I understand. And so the compensation part of it, the payment, doesn't necessarily negate the donation part of it. Right. So. And in medical language, donation just means taking something from one body and putting it into another. So I wanted to stick with those very specific definitions of what donation means. And people often get confused with donation and philanthropy. Well, donation and philanthropy is more sort of how we think about donation in lay terms, but it doesn't necessarily translate to the medical setting. So I want it to be very, very distinct and very clear that you can have paid donation. Right. Just because somebody is paid doesn't mean it's not a donation. And then in Spain, it's pretty much across the board talked about as egg donation, donacion de oberos or obositos or whatever. I haven't ever heard anybody really talk about it as provision there or in a more complicated market type of term. And again, in Spain, most donors aren't compensated more than €1300. It's sort of the standard rate. So it's not what we see here either, in terms of this tiered market where some people are paid dramatically more than others.

[18:37] Kim Krawiec: I just wanted to say I really like this distinction you're drawing between donation and philanthropy. I also tend to use the phrase donation, but just because that's sort of the common terminology. But I never thought about making this distinction between donation and philanthropy. I think it's a nice one. I might adopt it as my own and with. With due credit, of course.

[19:00] Rachel Greenbaum: Thank you for elaborating on that. Our next question is going to be from Mason.

[19:05] Speaker E: Hi, Diane. So you talk a little bit in one of your chapters about this specific donor, Ann and her journey being part of a VIP donation program. You also say that at some point, Ann learned she's only going to receive 13,000 of the $45,000 that she's been promised or at least has been advertised to her. At what point did she learn that this was the case? And did she continue with the donation process because of sunk costs or because it was too. It was unrealistic for her to discontinue medically in either case, do you think that she deserves some kind of damages? Or alternatively, is this the type of behavior you'd like to see addressed through future regulation or enforcement of existing laws?

[19:44] Diane Tober: Yeah, I think there needs to be honesty in advertisement. I'll speak to that topic first. This is one of the things I see repeatedly in the egg donation industry, specifically with the agencies, and specifically with the so called elite agencies where they're trying to attract women, Ivy League schools and and so on, is that this bait and switch tactic in the egg donor advertisements is incredibly common. So you might see earn $20,000, earn $200,000, earn $50,000, and even in some of the egg banks will say, earn $48,000, you know, be an egg donor. But they don't tell you you have to do it six times at, you know, $8,000 each in order to reach that level of compensation. And so this, this putting this number out there is just to attract somebody who's like, Ooh, $50,000. I could really use that to pay some student loan debt. Or I believe in Ann's case, it was to help her, her partner pay, pay down some education debt. And so those are typically the numbers very common to have those kinds of numbers in the advertisements. And it's also very common once the donor calls out to inquire, hey, I'm interested in donating eggs. I saw this $200,000 compensation that's appealing to me. Well, then immediately they're told, oh, well, that set of intended parents already found their donor. They already matched. But we have another set of intended parents who might be able to pay you $15,000 or $20,000. And so usually that disclosure happens at the time of the first contact phone call. So the donor calls up and they're told immediately, that's not what we're paying, but we can pay this. And for most young women, especially with young women with student debt, as we see a lot in the United States, for most of them, that lower number is still enough to get them in the door or to entice them to think, start thinking about it, right? So it's not like it would be something that's actionable because no, no contracts have been signed yet. So if they had signed contracts that said $50,000, then all of a sudden the clinic said, whoops, sorry, that was a mistake, then maybe there would be something that they could move on for that. So in Ann's case, she did not get compensated until the end of the cycle. But as she was starting to go through the screening, she had to Fly down to Los Angeles repeatedly, go through all kinds of tests and, and so on. And she wanted to pull out. She started thinking about the potential risk, she started reading more, and she started thinking about pulling out of the, out of the agreement. But by that point, she was three months into it. She had devoted so much time and energy into it that she was like, well, I might as well just keep going forward. And then, then when she did a second cycle, I think she was paid 45 or $50,000. So that first cycle she was, she was paid less. But I do think that this honesty in advertising is something that should be addressed legally in terms of regulations. And also, for example, as a comparison again, and another reason why I chose Spain. In Spain, they're not allowed to advertise compensation. Now. Everyone kind of understands it's around a thousand euros. So it is sort of like out there in the public consciousness for people who are considering egg donation. But it's not like they're seeing an advertisement that's putting the money out first and pulling them in with that. So there's no bait and switch on that level. And it's a little bit less of that enticement that you get in the United States.

[23:25] Kim Krawiec: I'm not a First Amendment expert, but I assume that prohibitions on advertise, on advertising compensation would be problematic in the.

[23:33] Diane Tober: U.S. yeah, the U.S. is a very interesting place in that way.

[23:39] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, I'm assuming that would be legally problematic here. If any con law people are listening and you want to send me hate mail, get in line.

[23:46] Diane Tober: Yeah, I mean, I would imagine there are things that aren't there, from what I understand. I mean, I'm not an attorney, but from what I understand, there is something about truth and advertising. Right? I mean.

[23:57] Kim Krawiec: Oh, for sure. And actually there have been some states. So if any state AGs are listening, you guys should focus on this advertising issue. There have been some states that launched investigations. I don't know what ever came of them or whether just announcing that they were going to crack down was sufficient to get rid of some of the most egregious behavior. And it went no further. But over the years, there have been some state AGs that expressed worries about the bait and switch of the advertising.

[24:25] Diane Tober: I know in the state of California, there was some movement to at least disclose the potential risks on advertisements, which is another potential way of at least diffusing some of that money up front. You know, like, oh, if I know I could possibly get ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome and end up in the hospital, maybe that $10,000 isn't worth it to me. Right.

[24:48] Rachel Duffy: Thank you, Diane, for clarifying. It's really disheartening to hear and I appreciate the question from Mason very much. Now we'll hear from Gabriel.

[24:58] Speaker E: Hi, Diane, thank you so much for being here today. So there's been some recent sentiment from some groups in European countries criticizing the effects of immigration in the labor market. In Spain, we've seen some protests against the country's current immigration policies and a right wing push for anti immigration sentiment. You highlights how some of these Spanish donors are immigrants. How do you see this demographic breakdown affecting the country's views on egg donation? And is there any concern for this narrative?

[25:25] Diane Tober: So a lot of the anti immigration type of push in Spain, I haven't seen that infiltrate the egg donation market yet, per se. So far it seems to be sort of a separate thing. Some of the things that people in Spain have been really upset about has been, for example, people from the uk, from the United States, et cetera. Tourism, especially in places like Barcelona and Madrid, Airbnb, those kinds of things have really been problematic, especially in high tourist areas because they've taken local housing off the market and put it in for vacation rentals. So I've seen a lot of that. And in terms of egg donation, most of the donors that are immigrants, so there's a mix. There's some that are from South America, so for example, from Colombia, from Venezuela, Argentina, there's some that are from Ukraine, especially due to the war. Michael Naumann wrote a paper a while back on Romanian egg donors. And what I see playing out in the egg donation market again is because.

[26:38] Spain is such a hub for broader Europe, specifically with patients from France, Germany, Denmark and other parts of northern Europe is a drive to get blond hair, blue eyed donors for this broader European client. So, for example, Ukrainian donors are considered to be very popular because they have this so called European look, right? That's how Spanish people, how the Spanish clinics describe it to me, not how I'm describing it myself. So they would say, you know, we want people with a European look. So one of the things that I saw repeatedly, I was in the clinical setting and conducting some interviews and I was sitting adjacent to where the call, the call in the center was in the, in the, in the clinic for the donors. And I would repeatedly hear conversations like, you know, thank you for your interest in donating eggs, blah, blah, blah, and you know, can I ask you about your hair color and eye color and body weight? And then, and then pretty shortly into the conversation, I would hear something along the lines of, we don't have anybody that will match with you at this time. Okay. And then I would ask the person on this end of the phone, what did you mean by that? And they would say things, well, it sounds like she was Venezuelan and probably has indigenous ancestry and we can't match her to our intended parents because we don't have that many intended parents with indigenous ancestry and she won't be Spanish looking enough. And so these are the kinds of ways in which presumed race and presumed ancestry played out in the clinical setting in Spain. And yet at the same time, the Ukrainian donor or the Russian donor would be, you know, brought right in. Right. So there were disparities in that, but it didn't really play out in terms of anti immigration politics. It played out more in terms of resemblance. Right. Or presumed resemblance and presumed matching.

[28:41] Rachel Greenbaum: Thank you for going more in depth on that. Our next question is going to be from Buddy.

[28:46] Speaker G: Hi, Diane, I was curious what you make, if anything, of the different, more general reasons Americans versus Spaniards spend the money earned from egg donation, specifically, with Americans having a greater focus on higher debt burdens and Spaniards with a higher percentage, at least on leisure, shopping, et cetera. Do you see any moral implications regarding the different ways that that donation money is utilized in these countries? And does it have some ethical implications, whether one's more ethical than the other?

[29:16] Diane Tober: I mean, as far as I'm concerned, the donor goes through a lot and they can do with whatever fund money they receive as they please. So I'm not going to make any moral statement as to I think it's okay to spend it on student loan debt, but I don't think it's okay to spend it on leisure. That's not for me to really say that's what they decide is in their interest. But what I will say is that to me, I find it problematic that we have such high student debt in this country that people are compelled to do these things to get rid of that debt. And it's not just student debt, it's also other kinds of debt. We have a very debt laden society in Spain. People are not as debt burdened. The kind of debt people have in Spain that I saw with the donors was more sort of daily bills, you know, or monthly bills like food, housing, energy, that kind of thing. It wasn't this kind of high credit card debt, high student loan debt and things like that. So yes, the cost of housing is rising in Spain and I think the cost of housing is problematic. I think the cost of education in the United States is problematic. I think the debt burden is problematic. The fact that in Spain their money goes farther than a donor who makes a thousand euros in Spain, her money is going to go farther than a donor who makes $10,000 in the US I find that problematic from just sort of an economic standard. But I'm not going to judge what a donor decides to do in terms of many of these people are 20, 21 years old, you know, and at 20, 21 years old, if you want to buy a luxury item or go on a vacation and you're not thinking yet you're not thinking about those eggs, become a child. Right. Potentially is a whole different way of thinking at that age compared to somebody who once they get a little older. Does that answer your question?

[31:13] Speaker G: Oh, definitely. I guess I was more concerned with sort of issues maybe regarding coercion with the money going even further than it does in Spain. So they have the ability to spend on those certain things. Whereas in the US it feels like if you're drowning in debt, like in the age that you're talking about between in Your early to mid-20s, whether those practices seem a little less ethical. Whereas in Spain it feels like there's a little bit more of a choice if that money's able to be spent on things that aren't central to your livelihood.

[31:41] Diane Tober: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and that's a systems problem in my mind. Right. That's so like what are we doing here in the US that we have, that we have people shackled by so much debt that you have to exchange eggs to get some relief? That to me is a dilemma. And again, there's so much variation. Like for example, some of the donors of Spain are young single mothers, for example, or even married mothers, that they're trying to make ends meet and they're struggling and they want to be a stay at home mom, they don't want to have to go to work, they have young children. I used to see in the clinics, women coming in with their two year old in the stroller, that kind of thing. And so it tends to be a somewhat different demographic than what we have here in the United States in general. But I hate generalizing because there's so much variation. But so you do get some people that are bill burdened in Spain, but I don't see it as the same kind of debt burden.

[32:40] Kim Krawiec: Thank you for that clarification, Diane. It goes to a point I was going to raise, which is that. And as I read the results that you have there's no real distinction in terms of the use of the proceeds from egg donation for debt repayment between the US and Spain. It's just that for the US it's more likely to be student loan debt than some other type of debt. But otherwise the numbers are, are very similar.

[33:07] Diane Tober: Yeah, although, you know, like I said, some of the Spanish donors in the survey did have a tendency to have a little bit more freedom. The money went a little farther, so they might allocate some to bills and some to, you know, something fun. Whereas in the US again, depending upon how much they're compensated, it seemed to me that more was going to debt than was going to leisure.

[33:33] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, it's about the same for both. This is the problem that because I have read your book more recently than you have, so I have it here and it's slightly more than 35% in both cases. It's not a meaningful difference. But the use for student loan debt is quite different. As you emphasize in, in chapter three of your book, listeners make sure you pick up the book and read the whole thing. But we're discussing mostly chapters one and three today.

[34:00] Rachel Duffy: Thank you, Diane, for explaining everything in depth. And thank you buddy for the question. We're now going to move into a different series of topics. These questions are going to be focused on race, eugenics and coercion. So we'll start with a question from Sari.

[34:16] Speaker H: Hi Dan. So preceding the commercial expansion and litigation in the US egg market, such as the Kamakahi settlement, there were fears of so called designer babies and the potential for selectivity surrounding race, education and other traits. It seems that you believe these concerns to have borne out in the US context. Do you believe that Spain's clinic based model actually mitigates these risks or are there subtler forms of selection along similar lines that continue to shape who becomes a donor and how recipients select for the children that they would like to have?

[34:55] Diane Tober: Well, in Spain, the recipients do not select their own donors. In the US they do in Spain, the recipients never see a donor profile, never see a photo of her, nothing. They get zero information about the donor. In the US obviously we have an exorbitant amount of information, including potentially bikini shots. Right. So there's a very different kind of way in which in the US it's a very consumer driven market and the donor is the product. In Spain it's a clinical market that is curated by the clinic, controlled by the clinic, and the decisions are made by the clinic on behalf of the patient. So, so in Spain you're not going to be. You're not going to have a couple that says, oh, I want a, a donor with a, a degree from University of Madrid Computenza, you know, a PhD. You're not going to say. You're not going to have people say, I want blonde hair, blue eyes. Right, because everybody's matched and controlled through the clinic. But it does. That doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't somewhat eugenic implications.

[36:01] Through how donors are selected by the clinic on behalf of who is the presumed patient. I mean, they're going to select to be able to reach and serve their patients from, you know, France, uk, wherever. And so there might be these more subtle selection processes to choose donors who will meet those demographics. And yet there are other clinics. For example, when I was at an egg bank and donation clinic down in Maga, which is the south, south of Spain, down there they have a lot of patients from the Middle east and North Africa. So there they choose donors slightly differently than in the clinic up in Barcelona or Madrid, where they get. Or Alicante, where they might be getting more, you know, European, Prada, Europe, types of patients. So it is area specific, which is one reason why I wanted to go to different areas throughout Spain. In the US As I mentioned, you know already that, that there's a tiered market in human eggs where people are ranked based on race, class, education, hobbies, et cetera. So in that sense, it's very much replicates certain notions of what the demand is in the US market and how people categorize and think about and prioritize some genetic traits, so to speak, or phenotypic traits, over others. Right? And like I said, education is one of the primary reasons for selecting a donor. And now, you know, now you're starting to see these kinds of things with, you know, these billionaire baby projects, right? So people like, you know, Elon Musk is the first one that comes to my head or, you know, a number. There's been a number of different billionaires out there that are saying, well, you know, we need to select the best and the brightest, right? We need the most intelligent donors and, you know, and carry our genes forward, have 20, 30, 40 children or what have you through these, through these technologies. I was listening to the Kind Body podcast yesterday on my drive back from a conference in New Orleans, and there was a billionaire donor there with a baby project. He had actually been incarcerated, and he paid a donor $1.5 million for her eggs and then completely just tossed out all the agreements he had made to allow her knowledge and access to the children. But in any case, to get back to the point, so what I'm seeing in the United States is this sort of romanticized notion of what genes mean and prioritizing this certain type of genetic material over others. And it's done in a way where people don't understand how genetics operates. Right. For example, intelligence, it has many different things that play into intelligence. Just because you have a donor that went. Goes to mit, as one donor told me, doesn't mean you're not going to have a child who turns out to be a junkie.

[39:03] Kim Krawiec: Right.

[39:04] Diane Tober: And this was a direct quote from a donor of my book. So in any case, I do see these eugenic tendencies playing out. And then when I say that, people often push back and say, well, we have that in reproduction in general. You know, I'm not going to necessarily choose somebody who doesn't, you know, match with me in social class or religion or whatever that. So they say. So it's very difficult to kind of pinpoint. It's very complicated. And I also think it plays out in the US in terms of the compensation system in ways that it does not play out in Spain. And I don't know if I'm answering your question, but I hope I did. Did that answer your question?

[39:44] Speaker H: That was great. Thank you. I appreciate the clarification and your mention of the fact that even though the donors or the recipients themselves may not be selecting for certain traits, that the clinics could potentially do that on their behalf.

[39:58] Diane Tober: Yeah. Because they have, you know, resemblance matching. And so, for example, if I'm trying to match somebody, I'm not going to match, you know, a brunette with a blonde. Right. I'm not going to match somebody with blonde, with brown eyes, with blue eyes. I'm not going to match their blood type. I'm not going to choose A, A B donor for an A recipient. Right. So the matching plays out on multiple levels, and it also plays out with the facial biometric systems that they use in Spain. They use AI and take photos of the donor and the recipient and try to match different points on the face to try to get a similar structure of the face. I. I think in Spain, they try to avoid these eugenic implications, especially with the compensation structure and the way in which donors are selected by the clinics rather than by intended parents. And at the same time, there's still subtleties there.

[40:46] Kim Krawiec: Yeah. Diane, I. So I appreciate, as well as Sari does, the nuance you're bringing to answering the question, because I think I'm not persuaded that The US is more eugenic than Spain. It's just more open about it. Right. Like it's more visible and because the selection by fertility professionals will be systematic in some ways. Right. Like it's their assumptions about what recipients are looking for, whereas recipients will often have sort of idiosyncratic preferences. Not everybody wants an Asian donor from MIT who plays the cello.

[41:26] Diane Tober: Exactly.

[41:27] Kim Krawiec: I think I'm just, you know, six of one, half dozen of the other. They both are. Have an emphasis on traits that we might not prefer from a, I don't know, from an ethical or slash scientific perspective.

[41:41] Diane Tober: Well, the thing about the US market is that you blatantly see that donors are products, okay. And they're blatantly paid for and bought and sold basically based upon the marketing package. Okay. In Spain, they at least try to make it more clinical. Yes. There are assumptions that play into the selection processes and so on. For example, the exclusion of potentially a donor with presumed indigenous traits because they can't match her. Right. And it's framed in these different ways. It's framed in that, well, we can't recruit a donor that we can't match because, you know, she's not going to have Spanish looking features. It's framed that way. But it doesn't necessarily mean that there still aren't eugenic implications or, you know, playing into how the system is set up and how donors are selected. But in the US especially when it comes to the compensation structure and the marketing and the visual representations and the fact that it's so consumer driven, it to me, it's just, it's so in your face. I mean, I remember one time at a conference, a reproductive medicine conference, and I was walking up and down the aisles and there was a VIP donor in the exhibit hall. And there was one VIP donor station, right. And they had this donor standing on a pedestal, you know, on the video screen, dressed in a camisole and just leggings, you know, and very tight form fitting, her hair all done up, makeup all done up and rotating on this pedestal360 so you can see every inch and aspect of her body on this platform. And, and she, it was very much a marketing towards beauty, towards perfection, towards being a vip. Right. And they had this whole glossy catalog that looked like a Cosmopolitan magazine, right. It very much looked like Cosmo. The poofy hair, the. The modeling shots and so on. You never get that in Spain. You might see a little bit that in advertisements, but even the advertisements are far more subtle than they are here. And that's kind of what I'm trying to pick apart.

[43:53] Rachel Greenbaum: Thank you so much for going into depth with that. Our next question is going to be from Katherine.

[43:58] Rachel Duffy: Hi, Diane.

[43:58] Speaker I: Thanks for being here with us today. Yeah, that's a great conversation to lead into my question. Your book highlights a tension between the free market and eugenics concerns. So in the US Compensation to egg donors is based on demand and women can negotiate for terms and compensation that reflect their value, as is the case with other providers of goods and services. On the other hand, many US agencies and intended parents engage in trait based donor selection processes that you compare to eugenics. Is there a potential framework for egg donation that appropriately compensates donors for their time, energy and health risks while avoiding crossing into eugenics territory? What ideas out there do you think are most promising?

[44:41] Diane Tober: Well, I mean, I think it's really difficult. I think Spain approaches that and yeah, you know, and then, but donors are not necessarily, I mean they, most of them feel like they were fairly compensated for what they do in Spain. And I, I, I really don't know, I guess is the answer to that question because I think it's complicated. Part of me would actually like to see and, and I, I talked about this in my last chapter called Just Eggs where I kind of lay out. What I would like to see in terms of ethical practices in the egg donation industry, first off would be to have a model based on human rights, reproductive justice and informed consent. And so I think that instead of focusing on this compensation issue, if we focus on the fact that we're not going to end the egg donation industry, so how can we do it in a way that acknowledges and respects all parties involved and including the donor conceived child or donor conceived person, because they're often not given any access to the identity of their donors. And many of them feel very strongly that that's their right, that they have a right to have information about the biological origins. And so I think if we try to focus. Like for example in the last chapter, I have a donor, I call her Alan. And she decided that she did not want to participate in the commercialized donation process. Initially she was going to donate her eggs to get the money to freeze her own eggs. And then she decided, well, she found out that there were egg freezing, egg sharing kinds of programs and, and also being a black woman, she thought, I don't want to participate in a project in which people are bought and sold. I wouldn't want any ch, any child born from my eggs to feel like they had been purchased. Right. And so she decided to go to a clinic that did egg sharing because she wanted to remove herself from that commercialization of buying and selling people. And she also wanted to be able to have contact with the children born from her eggs because she felt that since her ancestors were stripped from where they came from, and because she understood where what it was like not to know your origins, she felt it was very important for any child born from her eggs to be able to have contact with her in case they had any questions. And so in that last chapter, what I really set up is what would donation look like if we could remove that commercial element or at least diminish it to focus more on the human aspect. And when you focus on the human aspect, the neo eugenics kinds of implications start to not dissolve completely, but they slip away a little because you're focusing on family creation and relationship building rather than focusing on I want that, I want that product. I deviated a little bit from your question, but yeah, thank you.

[47:43] Speaker I: That's really. That was a great response.

[47:45] Rachel Duffy: Thank you. All right, thank you, Katherine, for your question. And next up, we have Cindy.

[47:52] Rachel Greenbaum: Hi, Diane.

[47:53] Rachel Duffy: Do you think that allowing U.S. donors to create their own profiles, rather than having the agencies revise it, do you think that that would help or hurt the high expectations for perfection that donors internalize, especially since US donors are driven by student debt. And I mean, going on what you were saying about the last chapter of your book, do you think that helps or hurts the commercialization of this?

[48:25] Diane Tober: I think a couple of things. So, for example, most donors or potential donors that are building their profile, they do know that they want to be chosen. Okay? So there is a tendency to want to put your best face forward, so to speak. And at the same time, most of them also want to be honest. So, for example, one donor told me that when she built her profile and she had included, that she smoked marijuana from time to time, or at least had in the past, and the agent and she wasn't getting picked and the agency recruiter told her, well, you know, maybe we should take that out of your profile if you want to get picked. And as soon as she did, she got chosen. And then so, but it's different. So when, when the agencies are crafting a profile, they, especially the so called lead agencies, they might send the donor out for modeling shots. They, they really curate that sort of image of what they think is going to appeal to an intended parent. If a donor says, or a potential donor says that she likes to ride motorcycles, they might turn that into she likes to play volleyball. Right. Because Playing volleyball has a different kind of image than, you know, riding motorcycles potentially to attend to parents. So. So I think when the agencies construct the profiles, there's actually a tendency to embellish more than when a donor does it herself. And I think even. Even when the donor does it herself, she's still trying to, you know, so to call, market herself. But I think that even becomes more enhanced when it's done by the agencies.

[49:58] Kim Krawiec: I mean, I don't know, Diane, like that. So that's happening now because we. We have agencies doing the curation, right? But I don't see young women on TikTok or OnlyFans or any of the platforms struggling to curate their image to appeal to consumers. It's just that some are better at it than others. And so I think my prediction would be that without the intervention of agencies, you would still see that level of curation, but some donors would be better at doing it and would have the resources to propel themselves. Right. To get the good shots or do whatever. And that you would still see that.

[50:34] Diane Tober: I mean, you do to a degree, but it's not to the same degree. I've talked to, like, 300 some odd donors, right. And I've talked to them specifically about how they constructed their donor profiles, which is mostly like a Facebook profile. Right. And so when I talk to them, they tell me that they were appalled, for example, when the agency changed their information and changed what their essay and things that they had written. And some of them had told me that they even called the agency and said, hey, wait a minute, that's not what I put. And the agency said, well, you'll get picked faster if we do it this way. Like I said, donors want to put their best foot forward, too. And now that we have TikTok and those kinds of social media things. Yes, there. There is that kind of, you know, selfie culture where you want to be as beautiful as you can. And I see it, for example, with donors who are trying to meet people on Facebook. I see this all the time, where they'll have photos of themselves and they'll have photos of their children, if they have children, and they'll have photos of, you know, so they'll put these images out, but it's the crafting of the story that's a little different, especially when it's. The donor profiles aren't. Aren't TikTok and. And. And those kinds of things. The donor profiles are things within a particular system where it's like a. It's more flat. Right. It's not a video. Well, they can do videos too.

[51:52] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, so I'm, but so this is what the donors are doing under the current system with an agents, with agency, intermediaries. And I, what I'm suggesting is that I think the market.

[52:05] Right. If you got rid of the intermediaries, the market would change and the way that people respond, the way that prospective donors respond to those changes would, would evolve over time as they saw what worked and what didn't and would become if they want to get picked and they want to be compensated and these are the things that customers are responding to, I would just expect it to, to eventually evolve to that as well.

[52:31] Diane Tober: Like I said, there, there is an element of that, but it's not as, it's not as highly crafted as it is when you have a marketing team doing it. And yes, some women are, you know, some people are better at marketing than others, you know, even when it comes to themselves and their own businesses. But just from what don't. And I have seen, for example, donors do their own profiles on a Facebook trying to recruit intended parents, you know, directly. And it's still not as quite as sophisticated as what a marketing team's going to come up with at an agency where they have, you know, thousands of dollars to throw at it. Right? Yes, I think it could get there if it was that case. But from what I'm seeing now and from the donors that I've spoken to, and some donors do craft their own profiles, you know, in some of the clinics and so on, that don't get curated. So there are differences depending upon where the donor goes. But I think when you have a marketing team, that's a little bit different than being an individual doing it yourself. Not that it can't happen. I'm not saying that it can't happen, but I think that a marketing team is going to be more sophisticated in coming up with the profile and putting forth the product.

[53:37] Rachel Greenbaum: Thank you for elaborating on that. Our next question is going to be from Denise. Whenever you're ready.

[53:43] Speaker F: Hi Diane. Thank you for such a great conversation today. One idea we've talked about a lot in class and that I thought a lot about while doing these readings was your description of Josefina and Spanish egg donors and the link between poverty and coercion. So I have a two part question, like many of our questions here. So I'll kind of try and break it down into part one and part two. And part one is, I was just kind of curious about your conclusions. Was it that Spanish egg Donors are more coerced than American donors because comparatively they're a little bit less educated and financially less well off than American donors? Or is it that American donors are actually more coerced because they're more indebted generally and lured by this promise of high pay that sort of doesn't always materialize?

[54:27] Diane Tober: Neither. Coercion operates differently in different systems and there's different factors that come into play. And I don't think it's an either or question. It's about, it's more along the lines of, you know, what information are the donors getting before they go into the process? You know, in the United States they're getting the money forward. Right. The informed consent process is not always thorough. The informed consent process is not always thorough in Spain either. And people have different motivations for going into it. And also, I mean, to be fair, for some, there is actually, there is really this desire to help families too. So it's not always just about the money. That's also a lot of donors do express that they really want to help people and, and, or donors might express they don't want to have children of their own. So this is their way of, you know, having the genetic material out there. So I don't think it's a matter of which place is more coercive. I think it's a matter of looking at how does information and, and access to information and motivations, how do these operate differently in different settings and what are the outcomes of those, those phenomena?

[55:45] Kim Krawiec: I love that answer. Thank you.

[55:48] Diane Tober: Sure.

[55:49] Speaker H: Perfect.

[55:50] Speaker F: And then I guess I'm actually very intrigued by this answer because I thought it would be a little more straightforward. I didn't realize you'd have so much nuance. But to the extent that we can think about coercion with respect to this, how do you think that that coercion might compare to another well paid but risky physical labor job like the trades or field work, where there's still potential harm to your body, but there's potentially high coercion in the terms of financial reward.

[56:17] Diane Tober: I mean, there are many different kinds of, of things that people can do for money that can have different outcomes on the body. It can affect the body. For example, being a house cleaner, you're exposed to chemicals, right. You're not getting paid necessarily, you know, $10,000 for three, for three weeks worth of work, but it could have an impact on your body. When I was in Iran, I did a little bit of research on kidney sales because Iran is the only country that enables that pays somebody to compensate somebody, to provide a kidney to somebody else. At the time, it was only about a thousand toman, about equivalent to $1,000. And now I think it's more like three to $5,000. But I was looking at, you know, how, what kind of information they get. They didn't get really much information. They didn't even know the function of a kidney. Coercion is an element, but it's also a complicated element because first of all, the motivations are different, the information is different, the knowledge is different. You know, we don't, we still don't know if the fertility medications used, do they impact reproductive aging? Do they affect the, how do they affect the ovarian function? There's a lot of things that we don't know. So if a 22 year old is thinking, oh, good, I can make $10,000 and it's risk free, well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't, because we don't have that information. And even the information we do have isn't being uniformly communicated to the person who decides to undergo a process like this. So, for example, in my data and other people's data as well, ovarian hyperstimulation syndromes in a severe form, where people were hospitalized or having fluid drained from the body happened in about 12% of cases. And yet donors are told that the risks are less than 1%. So not having access to all that information is also a form of a type of coercion because a person might decide not to do it if they knew what the possible ramifications could be. I think when you're hanging out, you know, 10, 20, $30,000 to a potential a person to potentially provide eggs, and they're, you know, low income, they're a student, that's a lot of money for that time. And you don't know the ramifications? Yes, I think coercion exists and it could be mitigated by providing more information. And that doesn't happen really in either setting.

[58:41] Speaker F: That makes sense. Thank you so much.

[58:43] Diane Tober: Sure.

[58:44] Rachel Duffy: All right, now we have our last question from Bradley, the last closing question. Our podcast this semester, so much pressure.

[58:54] Speaker J: Hi, Diane, thank you so much for being here with us today. So when reading chapter three of your book, I was kind of torn between these dueling considerations when it comes to, like, compensation and then availability of egg donors along racial lines. So in particular, I'm thinking of black women in this case. So on the one hand, you note that many black women who need egg donors discover that black egg donors are nearly impossible to Find. And one reason you suggest is that that could be because they're undervalued and undercompensated. But then on the other hand, as has been kind of well documented in medical histories, black people as well as other minority groups have had pretty unfortunate histories with healthcare systems. So I'm wondering, like, given that history, I was conflicted between, you know, obviously wanting black women and other minority women to be equally highly compensated for the same physical labor processes that they're having to go through, but then also kind of being uneasy with the idea of black women being targeted for their reproductive material. So my question really is just what, if anything, do you think could be done to kind of bridge this gap?

[59:56] Diane Tober: Yeah, this is actually something I addressed pretty thoroughly in the chapter, in the last chapter called Just Eggs. And in that chapter I take a more reproductive justice approach to trying to, trying to break down these issues surrounding race, access to reproductive technologies and so on. And I started thinking about egg donation as a reproductive justice issue back in like 2013, 2014, and, but in a different way because I know black women don't have access to egg donation in the same way that, that white women do. And on the flip side of it, when it comes to donors with white women predominantly, or Asian women being more highly recruited, they're also exposed to greater medical harm than black women who are not recruited as much and are therefore somewhat protected, at least from that form of medical harm, even though there are many other kinds of medical harms black women endure. For example, when it comes to birthing, when it comes to being taken seriously in medical settings, great discrimination and so on. And interestingly, again, Alan, the donor in the last chapter, she talks a lot about her trepidation of becoming a donor because of some of these, these injustices and discriminations that she's experienced in clinical settings. And for example, even the first clinic she went to, they told her, well, we're not, you're not going to be as easy to, you know, sell because there's not a lot of demand for black donors or, or agency recruiters that told me when I asked them, well, you know, and they're telling me they recruit Spanish donors, they Spanish speaking donors, they recruit, you know, Asian donors, white donors, et cetera. I said, well, what about black donors? And they said, well, we don't really have that much demand, right? So this is, there's this assumption among many professionals that black women don't need egg donors because they're hyper fertile, right? These are some of these medical myths that permeate practice on multiple levels. There's also this, this notion that, that black women have children earlier and so therefore don't need, don't experience infertility when we know very well that black women do experience infertility at least as much as white women. So on the one hand, you have this problem of access for black women not being able to find donors. And on the other hand, you have women who might be considering donation and not being well treated by the medical professionals or feeling like they're being discriminated against in some capacity and therefore less likely to be donating or less likely to get picked. And so I really struggle with this because on the one hand, obviously for people seeking egg donation, I want to be able to see all people have equal access to the kinds of treatments they need, family building purposes or whatever. And at the same time, I would not necessarily want to say, you know, to black women, oh, you should go donate eggs. Right? I wouldn't necessarily say that to anyone. You know, it's, it's a very personal decision and I think, I think it's very difficult. And I think that, you know, like I showed in my data in that chapter three, I think it was, is that, you know, white women in my, in my sample were paid. The highest Pay was about $100,000 in that particular data. And the highest paid black donor, I think was like 15 to $20,000. So there's a huge discrepancy, at least in my data set on, on payment. Now, I don't know if that's extended to the broader population, if it's a representative sample, so to speak. But Alan, in that last chapter, for her, donating was something that she wanted to do because, and like I said, she was a black woman and was something that she wanted to do because she recognized that reproductive justice issue. And she became really, really well informed going through the process. And she was asking questions every step of the way. She did her research. She found a doctor that she, that resonated with her, her values. She found intended parents that resonated with her values. So for her, donating eggs was a reproductive, reproductive justice issue in terms of trying to help another black family have children that, that couldn't without her help. And so I think it's really complicated. And I, and I haven't fully come to terms like, I think the best case scenario is the route that Alan took, even though she still ended up after donating, having very severe endometriosis and had to go a whole other route. But anyway, okay, so I see that we're out of time, so I will. I will stop there.

[01:04:37] Kim Krawiec: Thank you so much for doing this, Diane. This was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed getting to hear more about your research and more about your thinking on these various issues. It was super helpful. Rachel or Rachel, do either of you have any last minute thoughts you want to get out?

[01:04:54] Rachel Greenbaum: I think I'm okay, but thank you so much for being with us today. It was really great to talk to you.

[01:04:59] Diane Tober: Yeah, thank you for inviting me. It was great to talk, to meet everybody. I. I haven't done a podcast in this kind of format before with all these different questions from all these different people, so that was really fun.

[01:05:07] Kim Krawiec: I'm not sure there are other ones along this format.

[01:05:14] Diane Tober: That was quite fun, though.

[01:05:15] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, great. Thank you so much, and thanks to all of you Taboo trade students for 2025. This has been tons of fun. And that's it.

[01:05:26] Diane Tober: All right, well, have a wonderful day. All right, thanks. Bye.

[01:05:30] Rachel Greenbaum: Bye, Sam.