How do you find an egg donor?

I got an interesting phone call this morning from my friend Jane. She asked if I would help one of her friends write a newspaper ad for an egg donor – apparently she thinks I’m a good writer! Her friend’s story is one that breaks my heart so of course I said yes. So now we start our hunt for eggs!

This woman has been to hell and back in her bid to have a second child. After her first child she suffered 2 stillborn births then found out she was going into early menopause and had heart problems, meaning no more babies for her. She then tried overseas surrogacy twice – both failed.  So that brings her to trying surrogacy in Australia which is much harder than it should ever have to be.

In Australia, you can’t advertise for a surrogate. You can do surrogacy,  but you can’t do it publicly meaning no ad and I’m pretty sure you can’t pay for it either. Although I’m sure many people do it and just “slip the money under the table.” It would be so much easier if Australia was more progressive thinking like America and it could all be done in the open but no – Australia likes to keep childless couples childless by making surrogacy and adoption near impossible to achieve. In Victoria, you need written approval from the Minister for Health just to advertise for an egg donor – good reason to move I say!

The donor doesn’t get paid but has medical costs covered so they’re basically doing it out of the goodness of their own hearts. It’s truly an amazing gift to give so it’s not surprising that many women would change their mind and pull out. But, if you wanted to go down that road, where do you even start?

I came across Egg Donor Angels – a website set up by a woman who started on her own journey and found it difficult to find a donor. Now, you can go to this site, post your ad and cross your fingers! There are 150 ads for people looking for a donor and only 25 from women wanting to be donors – clearly the odds aren’t good.

A Google search also brings up a range of websites that claim to foster the egg donor process with “contacts overseas.” This scares me enormously as no doubt many of these businesses would just be crooks, looking to pray on the anxiety, desperation and vulnerability of women to extort as much money from them as possible. It’s a process rort with danger and clearly it’s not one to be entered into lightly.

At this point in time, this is not a process I’m having to think about. However, as coincidence would have it, only yesterday I asked my doctor to do an anti-mullerian hormone test which is a test to check your ovarian reserve – how many eggs you have left. If you don’t have many eggs left, then you may as well skip all the natural trying and head straight to IVF because there isn’t a lot of time left!

I had the Day 3 follicle stimulating hormone blood test earlier in the week  which detects the level of FSH in your system. This is the first test to check your ovarian reserve – it’s an indication of how hard the body needs to work to get the follicle to start growing to release the egg. Mine came in at 5 meaning my body isn’t working too had so I should expect a good ovulation stimulation this month! Hoorah!

So, it will be interesting to get my results back next week. One of two things will happen – I’ll be like my Mother’s friend, who at 32, was told her reserves were very low for her age and she would go into early menopause, or I’ll have eggs galore and won’t have menopause until I’m 80! I’m hoping it’s the second, but if it’s the first, I’ll be happy to know I’m helping someone else hunt for precious eggs so I’ll at least be more informed about the process. Here’s hoping the words I come up with will bring her this longed for baby. I would love to think I’ve played a part in bringing a precious life into the world! I wonder if she would call the baby Fiona if it’s a girl?

Image by Stuart Miles

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