Janet Hanover (name has been altered to protect her identity), 28, of North Hollywood, CA., prepares for her fifth and final egg donation cycle. Back in 2003, she saw an ad in Back Stage West magazine and decided to donate her eggs for a couple who could not conceive on their own.
“At first I was mainly interested in the money but then I went for an interview, and found out about the program, and I thought if I could actually help someone else’s dreams and goals come true, that’s pretty great.”
About 6.1 million people in the US suffer from infertility. Egg donation has been an option for infertile couples since the early 80s and is combined with in vitro fertilization (IVF), the process of placing eggs and sperm together in the laboratory. When a woman’s own eggs won’t allow for successful IVF treatment, donor eggs are substituted.
Normally, a woman produces one mature egg each month and loses several immature eggs; through the use of medications, several follicles, or egg sacs, can be induced to develop extra eggs for retrieval. The process of IVF and egg donation requires that the donor take a series of injectable hormones, which induce the growth of multiple ovarian follicles. These follicles, which contain eggs, are then removed vaginally in a thirty minute procedure, and the eggs can be donated to a known or most often, to an anonymous recipient. Both donor and recipient undergo hormone injections to match their menstrual cycles, so while the donor’s eggs mature, the recipient’s body is ready to support a pregnancy.
Most fertility clinics offer egg donor services, but that’s often just a small segment of their business. “We think of our donor pool as more of a puddle,” says Susan Conway, MD, MPH, MMSc, a reproductive endocrinologist at Georgia Reproductive Specialists in Atlanta.
Georgia Reproductive Specialists recruit donors though ads mainly in the backs of alternative newspapers, targeting the 21-31 demographic with an altruistic bent. GRS’s compensation is 6K for the donor’s time and effort. Since it’s illegal to sell human tissue, the donor’s fee is for her participation rather than her eggs. Conway says compensation varies within metro areas across the country, where you may see it as high as $12,000 for a first time donor in a large city.
But the business has changed over the years now that infertile couples can shop online or turn to egg brokers, the colloquial expression for agencies that are solely in existence to broker deals between infertile couples and a choice egg donor. Some pay exorbitant fees that include donor’s travel across the country. While plenty of legit brokers exist, anyone can hang an Internet shingle and claim to be in the baby brokering biz. It’s a global baby bazaar with little regulatory oversight.
To avoid a fraudster, do your homework and ask your fertility specialist for referrals. Fees as high as $100,000 are supposedly bantered around for Ivy league graduates with excellent looks, a perfect medical history and a talent or two, like musical giftedness or a proclivity for science.
While the fertility industry is regulated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a 1992 federal law requires clinics disclose success rates of treatments, including births from donor eggs, the CDC does not govern compensation paid to donors. See their “assisted reproductive report” at www.cdc.gov/art/art20004/.
At the California clinic where Hanover has donated the previous four times, her online profile includes her age, health history, genetic profile, pictures of her as a child and an adult as well as her educational background, talents, skills and personality. Hanover’s been told that the first three donations resulted in pregnancies and her fourth donation was frozen for future use.
This means her original $5K price tag for the 2003 donation has jumped with each subsequent contribution. Her fifth and final gift will command a whopping 10,000 dollars, which is often the case for donors with such track records.
Hanover knows the drill well. “I did my first in 2003, the second in the fall of 2004, and then my third one last July, which was a split cycle, which meant that my eggs were split between two women, who were best friends, who were both unable to get pregnant,” she says. “Most recipients choose me because I have qualities that are similar to them. I’m an artist, so that could maybe be a seller too, because people want their children to be artistic or well rounded. They’re trying to create a child that’s closer to them.”
Conway tells me that at GRS, profiles don’t contain photos of the donors as adults. She says studies have found it takes more time to make a decision when couples have to pore through adult photos of women, when pictures of donors as children are what couples should be looking at to help visualize what their children could resemble.
The screening process for donors at GRS, as it is in most fertility clinics, is intense. Federally mandated laws govern screening for sexually transmitted diseases and there’s a genetic disease screen with a lengthy medical and family history. Psychological tests are also performed using the MMPI. Conway says it’s designed to weed out those who aren’t doing it for the right reasons.
If donors are married or in relationships, their partner also must be screened for sexually transmitted diseases. Donors also include their characteristics, talents, skin type, complexion and natural hair color, educational background and personality traits. Though most clinics limit the number of donations to five or six, it’s often on an honor system basis, where women can hop clinic to clinic or broker to broker donating more times than allowed.
The pressure on college age women, the most likely donor candidates, is growing. Conway saw one ad in a Dartmouth publication looking for donors under a certain weight, over a certain height with a certain SAT score offering up to 60K. College age women with student loan debt may see it as an altruistic and easy way to make a buck.
Yet the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and other fertility organizations say donating is safe when women are properly screened and treated. They say donors offer a vital service to women who can’t produce eggs on their own.
But potential risks do exist, including nausea and diarrhea, from a condition called ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome. More severe cases can result in shortness of breath and abdominal bloating. Donors may also face future fertility trouble, not to mention relinquishing rights to children conceived with their eggs could create emotional problems. Hanover needed more than the recommended 24 hours of rest after her first retrieval procedure. She ended up severely bloated and in pain. For subsequent donations, she takes several days off work to recover now that she knows how her body responds.
Hanover says her friends often ask what she thinks about the number of children with her DNA now in the world, but she is matter of fact. “It’s their child; I have no claim over it, it has no claim over me, it most likely doesn’t look exactly like me because the fathers have different genes,” she says, completely comfortable with her contributions.
“Honestly right now, I can’t see myself having a child; I don’t even have a boyfriend. If I can help other people have a family, that’s pretty cool.”