Choosing an Egg Donor: Part 2
Guidance for an Unexpected Journey

Written by Ellen S. Glazer, LICSW www.ellenglazer.net

Read "Choosing an Egg Donor: Part 1"
Part 2 continues with our list of important factors in donor selection...

Temperament
“I want a cheerful donor.”  “I want someone up-beat and happy.” “I want to know she is not depressed.”  I hear these phrases over and over and over again from intended parents. While few put this at the top of their list when they begin the donor selection process, it often emerges as a major qualification as they review profiles. People realize that there central goal is really to raise a happy, healthy child and to this end, a donors temperament may be a whole lot more important than her SAT scores.

Intelligence/Drive/Interests
One of the biggest challenges for all parents comes when we realize that our children are not what we imagined them to be. Athletic parents can have “couch potato” children. Artists can have children who love mechanics. Intellects can bear children whose favorite past-time is reading comic books. However, most of us have seen ample evidence of the power of genes and not surprisingly, intended parents consider intelligence, drive and shared interest when selecting a donor.  For some, the priority becomes academic achievement. For others, evidence that someone has drive and the ability to follow through to achieve goals is most important.  Still others look for shared interests or perhaps a donor who brings an interest or talent that the couple does not have but would welcome (I call these “bonus add-ons”).

Motivation
I once asked a very happy and proud ED mom to come to a support group and talk with others about her experience. When someone asked about her donor she quipped, “Oh she’s just someone who did it for the money.”  I cringed when I heard these words, feeling terrible for the bright-eyed and hopeful women listening to her and all the more so for her twin sons who will sadly grow up with this being their legacy.

Payment often plays a role in egg donation—there is no getting around it. However, intended parents are usually keenly aware that the decisions they make will form the foundation of their child’s story. Wanting a child to feel good about him or herself and not to feel in any way like a commodity or the product of a sale, most recipients that I know seek donors for whom payment is not the primary motivation. For example, I’ve recently known two families who chose altruistic young women who were joining the Peace Corps and planning to live on a $1 or so a day. Both donors acknowledged that the payment was attractive to them but explained that they saw it as a “win-win” situation—“I get to help a family and the money they give me will enable me to work to help others.”

Fertility
Egg donation is expensive, time consuming and stressful. For all these reasons and more, intended parents want fertile donors. After all, she can be the most wonderful woman, but if the donor is not fertile, she is of no assistance in egg donation.  How can infertile patients, in concert with their physicians, identify fertile donors?

Intended parents often pay attention to the donor’s age, personal family building and prior donations. Physicians will often recommend a young donor, say someone 21 or 22, because she is more likely to be fertile than someone 33 or 34. However, intended parents who want to feel confident that their donor has truly achieved informed consent may seek someone in her late twenties, hopeful that she is still quite fertile and feeling more confident that she fully understands what she is doing.

A donor who has had a child or children of her own, especially within the last year or so, is very attractive to many intended parents. In addition to being reassured that this is someone who truly knows what she is doing and what she is giving away, the fact that she has had one or more healthy children is reassuring.

Finally, there are women who have donated before and for many couples, a history of prior donations is attractive, assuming that they resulted in healthy pregnancies. However, the flip side of this appeal is that it can complicate the child’s story both in terms of the donor’s motivation (if she donates repeatedly, does this mean she is motivated by payment and is this truly a gift to a specific couple?) and in terms of who the child is related to. Donor offspring will always be cognizant of the donor’s existing or future children, as well as her nieces and nephews, but what about “donor siblings.” The popularity of the Donor Sibling Registry, an on-line resource for people seeking family connections, is testimony to how many donor-conceived teens and adults are curious about genetic connections.

So back to mind and heart.  After listing the various parameters—either on paper or in their heads—and talking extensively between themselves, most intended parents venture forward and begin looking at donor profiles.  As I mentioned earlier, the process usually begins by matching priorities—limiting the search to women who meet the physical or motivational or ethnic criteria that are important to the intended parents. However, what most find is that early in the process, the heart steps in and takes over. “I picked her because of her smile,” some will say. “I knew she was the one as soon as I saw her,” others declare.  “There was just something and I can’t explain it that let me know we had found our donor.”  And the phrase that is heard most often,“It all feels right.”

Connecting the Dots

Written by Melodie Shank, Staff Contributor

Ryan Kramer is, in a word, exceptional. He entered college at age 14, had graduated with a degree in aerospace engineering and was off to grad school by 18. He is also a donor-conceived child. At the age of 12, he, with the assistance of his mother Wendy, began a search for his “donor-dad”. What has evolved from that search is, again, exceptional. In 2000, taking what they had learned from their own search and from the experiences of others, Wendy Kramer established the Donor Sibling Registry, an independent, non-profit registry which serves more than 20,000 donor-conceived children, parents, parents-to-be, and donors from around the world. They have united over 4,800 people, and have generated over 6 million hits to their website in the past year.

In the early days of gamete donation, donor identity was nearly always concealed and in most cases the child was never told that they were donor-conceived. This tendency has changed dramatically in recent years as fears and stigma associated with gamete donation and infertility in general have dissipated. Similar in many respects to the experiences of adopted children, in the donor-conceived child there is a longing for connection and the specifics of origin that most of us take completely for granted. Donor-conceived children, whether through egg or sperm donation, generally enter this world having one half of their genetic identity concealed from them; unwitting parties to contracts and non-disclosures they never agreed to. The ever- increasing numbers of donor-conceived children, (38,910 live babies were born in 2005 as a result of 134,260 ART cycles performed at reporting U.S. clinics in 2005, compared with 20,659 babies born as a result of 64,036 ART cycles in 1996) suggests the growing need for, at the very least, a uniform approach to donor identification and a paving of the way for future contact and/or communication.

Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART) is, and likely always will be all about crossing boundaries. ART routinely tests the limits of science, psychology, social change and the law. The flurry of issues ranging from egg freezing technology to egg donor fees keep things interesting, dynamic and constantly evolving. One such issue is the debate for the need for a national donor registry, but few ART-related matters tug at the heartstrings like this one, because at the root of the issue is the curiosity and perhaps longing for identity of the donor-conceived child, who, in the final analysis, is the reason we all do what we do.