Having Your Baby Through Egg Donation. Evelina Weidman Sterling

big—Pierre’s sperm. For her it was more important for her to have Pierre’s baby than one conceived with her eggs. Although her doctor and others offered little support for the idea, Jenny began looking for an egg donor. When she found her, their collaborative efforts brought Olivia into the world.

      Male couples

      It is no longer unusual to find two men sitting together in the waiting room of a reproductive medicine clinic. Eager to have children together and often discouraged from adoption, a number of pioneering gay couples have turned to egg donation with a gestational carrier. Theirs is a very complicated and costly path to parenthood, but one that affords them the opportunity to share in a pregnancy, to lovingly create a child and to have a child with a biological connection to one of them.

      Since two men intending to have a child together know for certain that they need eggs, they confront none of the “what if” questions that many heterosexual couples face. There is simply no question of trying another medication protocol or seeing another physician as a means of attaining better egg quality. Hence, gay couples, for all the challenges they face, are at least spared the question “Do we really need an egg donor?” They do.

      Gay couples must also decide who will provide the genetic material. “Do we want to have one of us be the biological father and have the other partner’s sister donate eggs?” If so, then there does, of course, need to be a sister who is ready, willing and able to donate. What if there are two sisters? What if both offer to donate? What if neither offers? Do we ask? What if each man has a sister or close friend and both are willing to donate? In order to maximize their chances of having a baby, a gay couple might find themselves trying to figure out who is likely to be most fertile. It’s easy to see how this could all become very complicated, very fast! That said, increasing numbers of gay couples are making their way successfully through a maze of decisions and a mountain of costs and becoming parents with the help of egg donation.

      Female couples

      Perhaps it seems odd to think that couples consisting of two women might find themselves in the departure lounge of egg donation. After all, as one lesbian woman said to me (Ellen), “You’d think that with four ovaries we’d have some good eggs.” However, infertility does not discriminate and even lesbian couples can encounter egg problems.

      Female couples also turn to egg donation for reasons other than infertility in both of them. For legal reasons and for parity, some lesbian couples decide that one will donate her eggs to the other, who will carry their baby. Hence, each becomes an equal player—legally and emotionally—in creating their child. In some instances, there may be medical reasons for the donation: the partner desirous of pregnancy may not be the one with “good eggs,” allowing her partner to be the donor. Or the couple may simple prefer to conceive this way if one woman prefers to be pregnant and the other to pass on her generic heritage. I (Ellen) know one such couple in which the Vietnamese-born partner wanted to pass on her cultural heritage and her American-born, Caucasian partner wanted to be pregnant.

      To state the obvious, lesbian couples require sperm donors. Hence, those who are also pursuing egg donation travel down a path that is complicated medically and logistically. It is also expensive and, in many ways, emotionally uncharted. Sometimes the woman who ends up carrying the baby is not the partner who really cared—at the beginning—about being pregnant. Sometimes the one donating her eggs didn’t care as much about a genetic connection as a gestational one.

      As we have seen throughout this chapter, people enter the departure lounge of egg donation for a variety of reasons. Many of our travelers carry a heavy load. They are women who have wanted to become mothers for years and, for one reason or another, time has run out (or is running out) on their eggs. Others travel somewhat lightly. They may have had children years ago and now, much older and in a second marriage, feel grateful that there is way that they can still bear a child. Male couples probably feel overwhelmed by costs and the complexity of the process but appreciate finally having a place in any departure lounge for parenthood.

      Some of our travelers will spend time in the departure lounge of egg donation but ultimately decide to take a different course to parenthood. Others will acquaint themselves with egg donation and feel fortified to pursue it. In the next chapter we will take a look at the ways in which people approach egg donation, at the questions you are likely to ask yourselves and at some of the answers you may find.