Mar 18 (Pen Men at Work): Now this may be the first incident of its kind. An American fertility clinic which is trying to promote itself in England invited fierce criticism for itself when it offered free eggs from a U.S. woman to one participant in a promotional seminar in London on Wednesday. The Virginia-based Genetics and IVF Institute held a free seminar for about 100 British attendants on Wednesday night, where one randomly chosen couple won a free donor egg treatment.

“There’s something shocking in the association of a raffle and giving away a human product,” said Dr. Francoise Shenfield, a fertility and medical ethics expert at University College London. “In Europe, we have the general idea that altruism is a good thing, and we don’t want to turn human body parts into a commodity.”

Many have questioned the ethics of the event, as they think it violated the European law which forbids fertile women from being paid for their eggs, to some extent. This rule limits the number of donors and makes it very difficult for infertile women to obtain eggs in the U.K. and much of Europe, therefore for many years infertile European women seeking eggs have traveled to other countries like America — where paying for eggs and sperm is common and legal.