- Egg donor advertisements tout life-changing paychecks of up to $275,000 on social media.
- But agencies and donors both agree that the process should not be confused as an easy way to make money.
- From giving yourself hormone shots to rigorous testing, here's what it's like to be an egg donor.
The complex nature of the egg donation business is baked right into the name. A careful balancing act between the monetary and altruistic, egg donors are not supposed to be overly motivated by their paycheck.
Of course, many are. After all, it's not just a donation — it's work.
Both physically and emotionally tolling, egg donation is "in no way a process by which you can make a quick buck," four-time egg donor Gina-Marie Madow told Insider. "You work for every single penny there."
The role of money in the $1 billion egg donation industry was decided in a 2016 class-action lawsuit, when a group of egg donors sued the American Society for Reproductive Medicine to eliminate its $10,000 compensation cap per donation.
As a result, today donors can make much more than $10,000 a cycle, as evidenced by a quick Google search or a scroll through social media, where posts advertise upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many women choose to use the money to pay off student loans or go to graduate school, including two donors interviewed by Insider.
"As an egg donor, you can receive up to $48,000 and help fulfill a family's dream," one Instagram ad from Fairfax Egg bank reads.
The advertisement features a young, blonde woman wearing a pink sweater and pearl hair clip. Smiling, she picks up the phone, immediately receives an orange pill bottle which she playfully shakes before she grabs her car keys and ... voila, a paycheck arrives.
While advertisements like these may not be untrue, they don't show the full picture and can at times be misleading, said Madow, who is now the Director of Legal Services at ConceiveAbilities, an egg donor and surrogacy agency. Often, the compensation advertised is the payment for multiple donations — not just one.
The Society for Ethics for Egg Donation and Surrogacy (SEEDS), a nonprofit working to define a set of ethical standards for egg donation and surrogacy programs, suggests monetary agreements should not "be dominating the ad nor in presentation format to call undue attention over other elements of the ad."
However, "it's a delicate balance with finding the right way to attract women to their website," according to Madow. "It's up to the donor to ask really good questions and the agency to educate her honestly so that she knows what she's getting into."
What donors are offering is really priceless. And they are very much aware of what their value is to future parents.Gail Sexton Anderson, founder of Donor Concierge
Advertisements offering $100,000 per cycle or more usually come from confidential private clients or individuals searching for donors with a very specific set of characteristics.
"I just think that those ads are not meant to attract the most qualified donor," Rachel Campbell, Circle Surrogacy's Manager of Egg Donation, told Insider. "They're meant to attract the donor who is in this for the money."
Ultimately, it falls on the donor herself to fully understand what she's signing up for. On the agency side, personality tests and psychological evaluations help agencies determine if the donor is emotionally ready for the commitment, according to Donor Concierge founder Gail Sexton Anderson.
But the long-term health effects of egg donation are still unknown due to the lack of research in the space, Anderson added.
Women have reported developing breast cancer, fertility loss, and colon cancer following donation. For years, scientists have called for a mandatory national egg-donor registry and long-term data collection to better understand risks, which has yet to come to fruition.
What's required to become an egg donor
Before all else, the donor's application must be approved and pre-screened in order to start the process. This requires genetic and fertility tests, medical screening, blood work, ultrasounds, and mental health assessments.
Once approved, donors wait to be matched with a prospective parent — a process that can take days or months depending on how "in-demand" their characteristics are. Agency clients can filter down details like number of degrees, hair and eye color, height, and even religion.
Most clients are "looking for someone who reflects you as much as possible," Anderson explained. "It's something that helps the intended parent to feel a little bit more at ease or in control of something that they have no control over."
The matching process can range from anonymous or semi-anonymous to known. While first-time egg donor Eleanor Houghtaling told Insider she preferred her donation's anonymity, Madow said her favorite part about donating is getting to know the family she's helping.
After a donor is matched with a client, the cycle begins. A full donation cycle typically requires two to three weeks of self-administered daily hormone injections, followed by around a month of screenings and monitoring appointments.
Once the donor is medically and legally cleared for egg retrieval, the surgery is scheduled. During retrieval, the donor is placed under a mild anesthesia, and needle is stuck through the vaginal wall and into the ovaries to collect an average of 15 to 20 eggs, Parents.com reported.
"The most difficult part of the process is physically taxing," Madow told Insider. "It's not fun injecting yourself with hormone medication and having a surgical procedure under anesthesia."
She continued: "It's a commitment for a couple of months to get through the process, but it has a lifelong impact."