There it was, plain as day, in a big four-color ad in the American Airlines in-flight magazine: “DONOR EGG Immediate Availability.”

The beautiful baby and the also beautiful and doting mother at the bottom of the ad confirmed it. There’s no reason to chase the 400,000 “frozen opportunities” already on ice in the United States. You can select a brand new egg for yourself, and presumably add in the sperm donor of choice.

I quickly read the fine print. “The internationally renowned donor egg program at based in suburban Washington, DC has long met the high expectations of sophisticated patients and medical specialists from around the world.”

I couldn’t help myself. I turned to the airline route map in the back. “Around the world” pretty much summed up everywhere American Airlines flies.

Still a tad bit stunned, I flipped back to the ad.

“We offer approximately 100 fully pre-screened donors immediately available for matching by our patients including Doctoral Donors (this last in caps) in advanced degree programs, and numerous other egg donors with special accomplishments, talents, or ethnicity. Current and childhood photos are available.”

I knew I irritated when I sniped to myself that Doctoral Donors would no longer be in advanced degree programs, since they would already have their doctorates, and I was clearly over the top when I murmured, “Gals without baby pictures need not apply.”

Continuing on, I read: “Each donor is fully screened for genetic and other factors by our own medical geneticists using laboratory methods conforming to the highest standards of reliability and sensitivity,” which led to more boilerplate, an 800 #, a web site address and the organization’s slogan: “Life begins at the Institute.”

You bring the money. We bring the eggs, the technology and the audit trail. No questions asked. Including “Where the heck is the sperm?”

I was flying out of Missouri at the time, a state which has a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. It’s quite a tempest in the “Show Me” state, and this particular initiative is about whether or not to permit women to donate their eggs, given the health risks they are exposed to while doing so.

At this point, the religious conservatives appear to line up with the women’s health advocates, although for entirely different reasons. In fact, women’s groups complain that the conservatives are adopting their language as a way of quashing stem cell research altogether – a sort of end-around the issue with the same net effect.

There’s no doubt that egg donation carries risks, as any mother undergoing in vitro fertilization can tell you, and the safety of extracting eggs must clearly improve. At the same time, some women’s groups have put forth the notion that donor eggs should be just that – donated, co-opting “eggs for sale to the highest bidder” and avoiding the victimization of women in poverty.

But I returned to the ad. I was once a doctoral student with plenty of smarty-pants eggs to spare and no end of cute baby pictures. Could I afford to lose a batch of these eggs which would go to waste any way, naturally dispensed well before I was looking for a baby of my own? You bet. Could I have used the money? Absolutely. And through personal experience, I had compassion for those would-be parents who could not conceive on their own.

But should I have been able to sell my eggs?

Maybe I’m oversimplifying here, but it seems to me: You can’t sell your kidney. You can’t sell your baby. Seems to me, you shouldn’t be able to sell your eggs.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.