The Donor Egg Essay

I am splayed on the table, legs in large black stirrups—“boots,” my doctor says, as she wraps my thighs in towels. The nurse piles blankets on my chest—they won’t let me wear my sweater in the operating room, and my hands are so cold they’ve turned blue. “Are you warmer?” the embryologist asks, taking my hands in his. I shake my head no. “But you have a warm heart, yes?”

I see the embryos up on a monitor, my name, my social security number, the words “gestational carrier.” All morning, since my friend and I left the house at 5:00, I have been fighting tears. This day, this whole journey, is unfathomable. And yet here I am.

“Did you take your Valium?” my doctor asks, and I know it is to calm not just my mind but my uterus, relaxing muscle so the embryos stay put, hopefully allowing them to implant. She moves the ultrasound transducer across my lower abdomen. “Oh,” she says, “your poor little belly,” noting the patches of yellow-green bruises from weeks of injections. My uterus cramps from the pressure, my overfull bladder. Perfect, she keeps saying, looking at my uterine lining up on the screen. Perfect, the nurse agrees. Almost three years of fertility treatment have come to this. The nurse takes over with the transducer, holding it exactly where my doctor wants, and then my doctor is between my legs, passing a catheter through the vagina, through the cervix, up into the uterus. There, she says, can you see that, pointing to the screen, to these small rings of light.

My embryos.

The donor coordinator sends me the profile, auspiciously, on New Year’s Day. Brown hair, brown eyes, 5’6”, four previous cycles, a real adult (married with kids) going back to school to become a lawyer. I think, if I met her somewhere we would certainly get along, possibly be friends. She seems too good to be true. I send the results of her previous cycles—numbers of eggs, embryos, day of transfer, pregnancy outcomes—to my doctor. “Go for it!” she emails back. I put down $5,000 even though I won’t know the results of my own pregnancy test for another three weeks. It seems like a good gamble; if I actually conceive, which is the whole point, would I actually care if I lost that deposit? The coordinator thinks it is vaguely unethical; I think her “fertility journey” must not have been nearly as hard as mine.

To date, more than fifty-one thousand children have been born using donor oocytes (eggs).¹ Twelve percent of all ivf cycles involve egg donors, a number that rises substantially for women over forty.²

The decision to use an egg donor did not come lightly. My doctor first suggested it after my first failed ivf, when I was just thirty-six. I told her I wasn’t ready, asked when she thought would be a good time. She said to give it another year. But a year and many cycles later, and I still wasn’t pregnant. The month I turned thirty-eight I gave it one last try—a crazy aggressive cycle, as I came to think of it—the anti-estrogen drug Femara and a whole lot of Follistim to stimulate egg production, and it still didn’t work, just the palest baby pink of possible positives on the home pregnancy test. “You’ve given it your all,” my doctor said over the phone. “You’ve been more dedicated than most of my patients. Three follicles, and still nothing. If you need to do another ivf on your own we can do it, but medically, I think this is right.”

“If other means of assisted reproduction have failed you and you’re considering egg donation, there’s one thing of which we’re certain: Those looking for an egg donor often want children more than those who were able to have them the old-fashioned way.”³

I am not a reproductive endocrinologist or even a social scientist, but a writer and long...