Egg donation has been a burgeoning field since the '80s when the first egg donors received a scant few hundred dollars for their troubles and tissue. In recent years an increasing number of infertile couples have looked to technology to fulfill their dreams of a biological family and buyers have flocked from Canada and Europe, where the transaction is illegal. Hence, the price of eggs in America has steadily risen. Controversy finally erupted last fall when classified ads started appearing in campus papers across the country offering $50,000 for eggs from women of a particular height, athletic ability and SAT score. Then came the brouhaha over a dubious Web auction site called www.ronsangels.com that purported to sell the eggs of beautiful women to the highest bidder.

The New York Times' Carey Goldberg broke the story in October, reporting that the site was the brainchild of Ron Harris, a former fashion photographer and Playboy filmmaker who had since turned his efforts to soft porn on the Web. Within days, other media blasted the Times article, claiming the site was a PR stunt to promote Harris' porn business and accusing the Times of "hustling business for a two-bit pornographer."

Ironically, it was this Web site that motivated the ASRM to create the report. Although Sean Tipton, ASRM's director of public affairs, agrees the site was probably a hoax, it sent a red flag to the bioethicists and doctors who are watching the field evolve. Real or not, the site got bids of up to $42,000, proving that people are willing to pay big bucks to get the children they want.

"This report was sparked quite clearly by media reports of people seeking egg donors with specific characteristics and offering a large amount of money for them," says Tipton. "Specifically, there was the Ron's Angels Web site where he was saying that he had models who would serve as egg donors."

In fact, the ASRM's many objections read like a "don't do" list of all the things that ronsangels.com did. The report warns that high fees induce potential donors to donate for financial reasons. It's OK to compensate donors for time and inconvenience, it says, but women who give the gift of life should do so for altruistic reasons. Many donors are college students, and it's not right for them to harvest their body parts just to pay off their credit card bills, says the ASRM. Ron's Angels models openly admit they're doing it for the money. Nicole Newman, a 26-year-old actress, told the press she's doing it to make money for college. Another said she wanted the money so she didn't have to depend on men.

The report also quibbled that paying for the eggs, rather than just paying for the woman's time and discomfort, turns eggs into a commodity instead of a donation. Sperm donors are paid $60 to $75, and the whole process is done in an hour. Assuming that as an hourly wage, a payment of up to $4,200 for egg donors could be justified. Paying more than that is wrong, says the ASRM, because it commodifies the human body -- and that's disrespectful of human life. At ronsangels.com, it's not just the women's eggs that are the commodity, but also the women themselves. To view information about the "models" or bid on their eggs, you have to first become a member of the site, to the tune of $24.95 a month, billed discreetly to your credit card under the name "CCBill.com."

High payments for eggs, the ASRM also contends, encourage women to discount the rare but very real medical risks. The process, which involves the injection of hormones to induce "superovulation," causes the woman to produce up to about a dozen eggs instead of just one. Sometimes superovulation impairs the donor's future fertility; it can even cause a stroke. The risks are small, says the ASRM, but they must be assessed dispassionately -- which is tough to do with $50,000 at stake. So women need comprehensive information from qualified experts -- not people like Harris. Under the heading, "What are my credentials?" Harris boasts, "I am a renowned fashion photographer and director for 40 years." And in case you doubted his past experience, he adds, "I have been an Arabian horse breeder."

Finally, the report emphasizes that it's wrong to pay extra for specific traits. Paying a premium for women with particular traits promotes genetic traits that are deemed socially desirable. The ASRM's report calls this "a form of positive eugenics." Harris calls it "[n]atural selection at its very best," suggesting that buying eggs from beautiful women can give you an evolutionary advantage. Beautiful women and beautiful children, he says (along with fine art, real estate, gold, money and power), "help to guarantee the success of your genes, to get your genes to the next generation and beyond." Newman agrees. "I think a beautiful child definitely has a better chance in life," she told CBS News. "I think good-looking people just generally, just rock!"

So was the ASRM report simply an act of bureaucratic apoplexy in the face of a thinly disguised Web hoax? Perhaps, but the report also addresses an issue that has slipped through the legislative cracks. Egg donation is an uncomfortable and potentially risky procedure, and yet it's free from the rules governing human organ donation. The ethics of egg donation was an issue that had to be brought up and addressed eventually. While trafficking in designer eggs may be, as Tipton put it, "offensive and unethical," unlike the purchase and sale of organs like kidneys, it's not illegal.

Our society has long forbidden people to sell their body parts for profit, and the 1994 National Organ Transplant Act explicitly prohibits the sale of human organs. The logic goes something like this: If we let people sell their kidneys on eBay, we turn the human body into a commodity and create a market for body parts. Selling organs would make transplants too expensive for most people, and organs would end up going to the highest bidders, rather than to the most needy. Also, the poor might try to sell their organs to make ends meet -- like the woman who recently tried to sell a kidney to pay the bill for her gall bladder surgery. To put it bluntly, we'd literally be slicing up poor people to get spare parts for the rich. Not to mention the black market that would result. Basically, that old urban legend -- the one about the man who goes to a bar, accepts a drink from a strange woman and then wakes up in a bathtub full of ice to find his kidneys missing -- would come true.