If it's a business, someone's got to be making money

Egg donation is big business. More importantly, it's big unregulated business. There are few laws related to who can do it, how it's done, how much the donor is compensated, etc.

My doctor told me her clinic won't work with couples who want to pay more than the $7,000 recommended by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (I think that's what it's called). They won't work with women over 50, either. Both the donors and the recipients have to undergo a mental health evaluation, consult with a lawyer and sign a mountain of paperwork.

There are stories of couples who contact to pay tens of thousands of dollars for things like a perfect SAT, clean medical history, blond hair, blue eyes and a model's build. The reputable docs say they won't allow that. But, ultimately, the industry is completely unregulated.

In all, the cost is sort of alarming. The medical procedures are paid by my insurance (Blue Cross HMO). The donor agency gets $5,100 for recruiting the donors, screening them, getting them a lawyer and health insurance, maintaing the records and coordinating everything with the doctor. The donor gets $7,000. It will cost us $700 to freeze the embryos that aren't implanted the first time around. And the lawyer cost us $700. What's that? $13,500. All for a 65 percent chance of conception. I think the chance of success from donor to live birth is roughly 40 percent.

I find comfort in knowing that our donor's first cycle left a once-infertile couple pregnant with twins. But I also think it's a little strange knowing that twins that are due in April are genetic half-siblings of the child(ren) we're hoping to have.

I found the following story in ABC news. It deals with the economics of egg donation -- on a very superficial level. (Like all TV news.)

But it does raise some interesting questions -- especially related to the lack of regulation and the number of times a woman can donate.


Egg Donation: Is It Worth the Big Money?
Egg Donors Make Big Money but Take Big Risks
By GIGI STONE
Jan. 11, 2008—
Maryland resident Lisa Mullins wishes she had photos of all the babies that have been born from the eggs she has donated. Lisa has been through the donation process seven times, giving more than 100 of her eggs.
"It's addicting. It's the feeling." she says, "The gratification that you get from it."
Mullins says she derives joy from helping parents who are not able to conceive children on their own. She has also been paid handsomely for her trouble: as much as $8,000 for a single donation. Mullins has used the money she has made to create a college fund for her own four children.
But Mullins is not the only one profiting. Egg donation is a $38 million a year industry. Prospective donors advertise themselves online, listing everything from photos to IQ scores. The demand is staggering. It's estimated more than 6,000 babies are born in this country every year from donated eggs.
Some ethicists have called egg donation "the Wild, Wild West" of the fertility market. That's because there is no national registry or database to identify the donors and track how often they donate. While the American Society for Reproductive Medicine cautions women not to undergo the process more than six times, there are no laws to regulate this, and therefore no ways to really prevent women from possibly endangering their health by undergoing the process more times than is recommended.
Donating eggs is a very extensive procedure. A woman has to inject herself with fertility drugs every day for up to a few weeks so she produces multiple eggs instead of just one a month. Then when she's ready she goes to the operating room, where a doctor uses a thin needle to remove the eggs from her ovaries while the donor is under sedation.
Manhattan resident Julia Derek says she has donated eggs 12 times. "It's dangerous," Derek says, "because it's too much money involved so it's easy to get carried away and do it more times than is recommended."
In her book, "Confessions of A Serial Egg Donor," Derek writes that she developed a serious hormonal imbalance as a result of her donations, and she claims that a donor agency, which gets a commission for each donation, helped push her into it.
"[The donor agency representative] said other people have done it up to 16 to 18 times. And they are totally fine," Derek said.
Fertility doctors say that women who do this more than recommended are taking a serious risk.
"You're playing Russian roulette with your future fertility and your future health," says Dr. Robert Stillman, director of the Shady Grove Fertility Center in Rockville, MD, who has not worked with any of the egg donors mentioned in this article. "The more you ovulate, the greater the risk of ovarian cancer. So if these stimulated cycles are more risk, then there may be more potential as [these donors] age in their seventies and eighties to get cancer."
The risk raises questions about whether the money these women are paid is worth the ultimate cost: their health.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

To tell or not to tell -- Here's the answer!

Obviously, it's best to tell the children involved .... though I really don't even believe this story. Jury's still out on whether to tell my brother, my boss or anyone else.


Twins Unwittingly Got Married in Britain
By THOMAS WAGNER Associated Press Writer
4:55 PM CST, January 11, 2008

LONDON - Twins who were separated at birth got married without realizing they were brother and sister, a lawmaker said, urging more information be provided on birth certificates for adopted children. A court annulled the British couple's union after they discovered their true relationship, Lord David Alton said. "Everyone has a right to knowledge about their lineage, genealogy and identity. And if they don't, then it will lead to cases of incest," Alton told The Associated Press during a telephone interview Friday. Alton first revealed details of the unusual case last month during a five-hour debate about a bill that would change regulations about human embryology.
"I was recently involved in a conversation with a High Court judge who was telling me of a case he had dealt with," Alton said according to a transcript of the Dec. 10 debate. "It involved the normal birth of twins who were separated at birth and adopted by separate parents. "They were never told that they were twins. They met later in life and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences of the marriage that they entered into and all the issues of their separation." Alton gave no additional details and would not reveal the name of the judge who told him about the case. The High Court's Family Division declined to discuss or confirm Alton's account about the twins. Alton, an independent legislator who works at Liverpool's John Moores University, said the siblings' inadvertent marriage raises the wider issue of the importance of strengthening the rights of children to know the identities of their biological parents, including kids who were born through in vitro fertilization. Under British law, only a mother has to be named on a birth certificate. Such certificates also are not required to identify births that result from IVF or to identify the sperm donor. In addition, British law does not require parents to ever tell children that they were the result of donated sperm. Alton believes this should be changed. Alton said he favors an amendment to the Human Fertility and Embryology bill -- which is still being debated in the House of Lords -- that would require birth certificates of children born from donated sperm to say that and to identify the genetic father. Referring to the twins' case, he said: "If you start trying to conceal someone's identity, sooner or later the truth will come out. And if you don't know you are biologically related to someone, you may become attracted to them and tragedies like this may occur."

To tell or not to tell -- That is the question

It's a joke among friends. Ya know that whole six degrees of separation thing? Well, for me it's more like three degrees. Maybe two degrees.

I know a lot of people. And I know a lot of their stories.

But I have never met anyone who has donated or received eggs. (At least, I've never met anyone who has talked about it openly!)

People say reproduction is a miracle. To me, it's a science experiment.

But assisted reproduction is not a neat, easy process. Before we could move forward, we had to sign consent forms that asked us to spell out everything from how the sperm would be introduced to the egg to what should happen to any remaining embryos if we die.

I learned a lot about my husband during this process. For me, it was a no-brainer. We donate the embryos for stem-cell research. I'd be fine with allowing another couple to adopt them, though that wasn't an option offered by my fertility clinic.

But my husband, normally very liberal and open-minded, struggled with the idea that his potential offspring -- a fertilized embryo -- would become part of a scientific research. Of course he wanted to do his part for science. He knows how valuable stem cells are in research to fight Alzheimer's and other diseases. He votes for candidates who support stem cell research. He's pro choice, too.

But he paused before he could initial that box that would send an embryo with his DNA into a laboratory.

That made me realize that maybe -- just maybe -- it would be less than wise to let everyone in on the details of our efforts to have another child. I wondered whether my Catholic friends would judge me if we ended up with extra embryos and donated them for research. I wondered whether my family would accept a child that has no DNA connection to me in the same way that my biological daughter is part of our family. I wondered whether my conservative employer, whose health insurance plan is making the IVF process possible, would judge me for what I'm doing.

Ultimately, I didn't care whether my friends judged me. I decided not to tell members of my immediate family. And I inquired about a possible answer to my question about my employer.

I am an editor at a newspaper. It's a great place to work. The paper is independent -- it's not part of a company that's traded on the market. The newsroom is tight-knit. But newspapers are notoriously family-unfriendly. If you can't give it your attention 24/7, you're not very valuable in this industry.

More than that, though, I knew a lot of people in positions of authority had conservative Catholic leanings. So I did a little research.

When I was interviewing the egg donation agency, I asked them about how they find the girls. A big part of that is advertising in newspapers -- college papers, local papers, etc. So I asked if they advertise in our paper.

It came as a surprise to me that our paper refuses their advertising because of a moral conflict with the process. The owners are not a fan of egg donation or assisted reproduction.

In a time when newspapers are desperate for revenue, we're turning away ad dollars because someone hates family building through science. Or maybe newspapers really do just hate families.

Either way, I'm keeping my methods to myself.

Age is everything

In 1999, we weren't even trying.
Today, we have a bright, loving and funny 8-year-old daughter.

Since then, things just haven't worked out. For a long time, I was sure it was our opposite schedules. Or our infrequent, though scheduled, sex life.

Then I found out it might have been that polyp creating a hostile environment in my uterus. Removing it was surgery No. 1. After that was gone, it still looked like it would just be the three of us.

I am very grateful for what I have. My daughter is a joy. She's bright and funny and loving. But I'd love to give her a sibling -- even if there is almost a decade difference in age. When we're gone, I want her to have immediate family.

When I turned 40, my doctor suggested I see an infertility specialist because I was coming to what she called, "the end of the road."

Still, I never thought of myself as struggling with infertility. I just thought they'd do an insemination and everything would be fine.

That was 18 months ago. Today, I'm almost 42.

And it's still just the three of us.

Now we're enlisting the help of someone we know only as No. 948, a 24-year-old college student with similar ancestry and proven fertility. She has a great smile, musical ability, speaks another language and would like to someday join the Peace Corps.

And for just $13,000, we're getting her gametes.