Freeze-and-share programs offer young women a way to freeze eggs without ponying up the expensive costs. annalouiesuss reports on the ethics of these programs
Illustration: by Simoul Alva Dean Pfeiffer always wanted to be a parent. At first, as a queer woman, she figured adoption was her only choice. Then, maybe a sperm donor? When she was 22, a friend of hers presented her with another way: He told her about a lesbian couple his mom had worked with at a clinic in California who had done reciprocal IVF, in which each woman carried an embryo made with her partner’s egg. That sounded like a dream to her — an expensive one.
Eyvazzadeh says she has informally offered this option to donors since 2008, when she first opened her fertility practice . “You’re going to run out of eggs,” Dr. Eyvazzadeh tells potential donors. “Every single woman does, and sometimes they run out before they’re done having kids.” The average egg donor — as in, not the average egg freezer — is in their early 20s and typically financially motivated, says Diane Tober, a medical anthropologist and associate professor at the University of Alabama who has interviewed over 200 egg donors. Historically, women freezing eggs are typically in their mid- to late 30s, when they also have more resources to pay for it .
Sometimes unexpected scenarios arise. Anna Lyon, Pfeiffer’s partner, provided eggs for compensation five times in her 20s as she made her way through a master’s degree and then her Ph.D. When the child born from her first donation was a toddler, she received an email, stripped of identifying information and forwarded through the egg-donation agency. It was the toddler’s parent, asking for her permission to donate the remaining embryos that had been made with her eggs.
During shared IVF cycles, when donors and patients share a batch of eggs while each pursues IVF at the same time, it’s not unheard of for the intended parent to get pregnant while the donor’s IVF cycle fails. Surprisingly, donors do not always find this devastating — some reported being happy their donation yielded something positive, says Zeynep Gurtin, a lecturer at Women’s Health at University College London who has studied these programs.
She adds that as an anonymous donor, she did not always feel that her health was prioritized by the clinics where she was treated, in contrast to Dr. Eyvazzadeh, who has more of a stake in her own well-being. “I’m going to come back to her someday as a patient, right?” Lyon says.
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