A fertility clinic has doubled the usual payment for human eggs, raising concerns that the quest for egg donors is becoming a market-driven bidding war.

The move by the clinic at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston also has prompted an ethical debate over whether human eggs are a gift to be given for minimal compensation, or a commodity to be bought and sold."Egg donation? $5,000 a pop? I don't think so," said Art Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's a sale."

St. Barnabas placed advertisements seeking donors in several New York area publications last week, offering to pay $5,000 for each donation, which can produce several eggs. That's double the going rate for human eggs, which jumped to $2,500 a few years ago in New York and many other cities.

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Officials at the clinic in the New York City suburb said they are only trying to increase the supply of eggs to accommodate infertile couples, who often wait up to a year for a suitable donor.

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