Dynamist Blog

Tell the Truth About Egg Donors

Women are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, and after puberty, they start to discard at least one a month. As they reach middle age, they run out. When a woman of my advanced age, or, say, Elizabeth Edwards', has a baby, chances are very, very high that she used another woman's egg--especially if the baby is her first. Unlike adopting a child or using a surrogate, however, using an egg donor means you get pregnant and bear the child yourself. And that means you can pretend no donor was involved, which is exactly what a lot of people do.

Writing in the new issue of Elle, Nancy Hass looks at the ethical problems created by this vast conspiracy of silence. It's a long and well-researched piece and, fortunately for those of you who wouldn't be caught dead carrying a magazine with J.Lo on the cover, it's online. Here's a statistical bit:

You may have assumed that telling a child she's the product of another woman's egg mixed with Daddy's sperm in a petri dish would be obvious. Our society, after all, is increasingly obsessed with DNA and the influence of heredity, and we've come to believe that children have a right to know their genetic background. Until the 1960s, it was common to pass off adopted children as one's own; today, it's almost unthinkable. Add to that decades of movies and books warning of the danger of "toxic" family secrets and our collective experience of watching adoptees search the globe for their birth parents, and you might think that few among us would choose not to inform a child that half of his or her genes came from a woman whose name is sitting in a doctor's file across town.

You would be wrong. Since 1984, when the first egg donor baby was born in Australia, more than a million such children have been born worldwide, nearly 250,000 of them in the United States. But as the first generation of these children becomes teenagers, researchers predict that more than half of their parents will try to keep the secret in perpetuity. In a 2004 study of 157 couples, a third of the parents adamantly opposed telling; 18 percent couldn't agree on a plan, though some of the children in the study were as old as eight. Fewer than 20 percent of parents already had leveled with their son or daughter, and while a third indicated that they intended to eventually, the researchers say they doubt all of them will follow through.

And this report probably overstates parents' openness. Coauthor Susan Klock, a Northwestern University psychologist, says that the response rate to her questionnaire — 30 percent — speaks volumes. "Of the 70 percent who won't talk, you'd be safe in assuming that the majority of them aren't planning to tell."

Hass quite naturally concentrates on the personal dilemmas: What happens if a child discovers the deception? How many deceptions do you have to layer on top of the primary one to preserve it?

But there's also a huge public policy issue here. Particularly from the anti-biotech left, banning payments to egg donors is one of the primary ways of stopping research that requires human eggs, notably therapeutic cloning. Where religious arguments against embryo research don't succeed, anti-commercial ones can. Canada's draconian law against cloning includes provisions that will essentially wipe out egg donation at fertility clinics. Donors are allowed only "documented expenses," with no compensation for the enormous trouble.

As long as people think egg donation is a freaky, unimportant activity, laws like this are all too easy to pass. The conspiracy of silence makes egg donation look much rarer--and far more shameful--than it actually is. For people to get used to strange new technologies, they have to like, or at least adapt to, the consequences of those technologies. People like all these babies; society has certainly adapted to their births, with minimum dirsuption. But egg donation still sounds strange, because too many mothers and fathers pretend it isn't happening.

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