Considering how long the cost of living has been a crisis, it’s taken a while to affect the price of one sought-after commodity: home-produced human eggs. Having been set at £750 for 13 years, the compensation limit for women who contribute their eggs is finally to rise, in England, Northern Ireland and Wales, to £986.
Not that this sum should be seen as a payment, fee or gratuity. Reporting on the increase, the BBC went out of its way to remind women that financial compensation is an incentive to niceness, nothing else: “Egg donors warned not to do it for the £986 cash”.
