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Only White, Straight, Attractive Women Allowed? The Strange World of Egg Donation
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At 8:50am I'd get to the fertility agency and carefully hang my coat while the phone rang. Messages filled my voicemail, left in that window of night saturated with infomercials and irrational thought patterns. A voice would fumble “Yeah, um. I was wonderin’ about this egg donation that I read in the paper. It says I can make $7,000.”
At least 80 percent of girls didn’t pass the first round of requirements. If one of my usual black callers made it through, I knew she would just sit in the system, never earning the promised seven grand. “You just want white bitches,” one girl said when her application was denied, and hung up. We did. The intended parents were buying genes, and they wanted white, movie star beautiful and diplomas from the right university.
Sometimes I felt awkward when a friend asked about becoming a donor. You had to be BMI fit. Even a past that included therapy raised eyebrows. When my cousin's girlfriend pressed me, I didn't quite know how to say that the company I worked for had a silent policy on lesbians. They never made it through. Not one. Bisexuals sometimes did, but when their bisexuality came up, we had to weigh whether or not we wanted them. Were their photos cute? Being bisexual myself, I felt uncomfortable with this rule and a little scared about being outed. I'd call one of my superiors, who pinged me around, until finally someone justified. “Well, they won’t pass the psych screening. And no parents will pick them.”
We estimated that the calls doubled in the economic meltdown. I worked there in 2008, a time when the economy was digging itself into a hole. A time when recent grads were facing college debt without jobs. The media picked this up as a trend story: “College students turn to donating eggs in economic crisis.” I was on television twice, answering the phone and conducting interviews while smiling: “I'm sorry but you don't meet our requirements at this time.”
As for intended parents: it seemed the price tag was not a deterrent — a single donation cycle cost $20,000, which does not include clinic fees and doesn't guarantee a pregnancy. Further, egg donations are on the rise: In 1992 there were about 1,800 egg donor cycles. In 2004 there were 15,175 egg donor cycles. (The industry has undeniably boomed, but this number also shows increase from eggs donated for stem cell research.)
According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, in 2008, 49 percent of intended parents for egg donation were white and 33 percent did not want to disclose their race, 6 percent were Asian and 4 percent were black, 4 percent Hispanic. The majority were in their mid-30s to mid-40s. The women I saw were seemingly middle- to upper-middle-class, some wealthy. In the past few years, intended mommy blogs have cornered a space of the Internet, about the hardships of infertility, giving a face to the thousands of woman going through this process every year.
At parties, I would find myself cornered by a flock of young women. They'd seen the ads on the bus too. I'd give my usual spiel: “If you pass the requirements you are put in the system and when an intended parent chooses you, we'll call and ask if you can go through a cycle. There are several early-morning doctor appointments. You will get a shot of hormones, side effects are similar to PMS. After a month, you will go through the egg donation process which is done vaginally. You'll be put out for it, and you'll wanna take the entire day off and get plenty of rest.”
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