Finding a match
When it comes to finding the right egg donor for a couple, the match is often in the tiniest detail. And Susan Ondr, who is a coordinator of the egg donor program at the Washington Fertility Center in the U.S., prides herself on having a discerning eye.
“Sometimes I will be talking to a couple and the perfect egg donor for them will just pop into my mind. Often it’s an expression or a spark that catches my eye, but I also have an ability to match personalities. I can pinpoint the detail-oriented people or the carefree, free-spirited types,” she says. “I remember one woman who came in wearing her military uniform. I had no idea she was a dancer, but there was something about her petite frame. She was tickled to death when I chose her donor — a professional dancer. It’s just an ability I have.”
Armed with her ideas, Ondr goes back to her database of about 150 egg donors to make a match — although she rarely needs to consult the computer. “My girls [donors] are like my daughters,” she laughs. “Because of the extensive screening process these girls go through, I really know them — and by the time we get to this point I really know the recipient couples as well.”
This is the world of baby making for many of today’s fortysomething women. Just when they feel they’ve finally got a good handle on life, they lose their grip on fertility, and the dream of motherhood turns into a desperate prayer. This is when the journey begins; for some, it ends with adoption or the acceptance of childlessness, but for others it is a high-tech battle to beat the clock, with the trump card being a younger woman’s eggs. In fact, age-related infertility is the primary reason for the use of donor eggs.
Heading south for egg donation
While finding an egg donor is never easy, it’s particularly challenging for Canadian women, a number of whom are joining the ranks of “fertility tourists” south of the border. Less restrictive laws about payment to donors have ensured a large supply and wide variety of donors in the United State— something Canadian clinics cannot compete with, says Roger Pierson, a professor and director of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, and spokesman for the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. The result in Canada is a patchwork of donors with virtually no matchmaking options, compared to the exhaustive details and colour catalogues available in the U.S.
At 45, with many years of infertility behind her, Catherine Douglas* of Montreal didn’t think twice about leaving Canada to find an egg donor. Two years later, tired but very much enamoured, she is pushing her 16-month-old twin girls in a double stroller and feels she and her husband made the right choice to go to a San Diego clinic.
“We did some limited research here in Canada, which was not very productive. We were not clear on how to judge or select someone, or what safety nets would be in place, and we weren’t comfortable working directly with a donor, rather than through a clinic or a donor agency,” she says between chat about colic and her babies’ pretty noses.
Yet even with the pages of donor profiles and photos available online from American agencies and clinics, she and her husband found the process of choosing excruciating. “Blasting through millions of tiny faces set in inch squares, squeezing in as many pages a session as we could tolerate, it was almost impossible to size up, from that extremely limited and miniscule view, which of them seemed like a good person,” she says. “I asked myself, ‘Is this one like me? Does she look like a professional, or working person? Is it important that her favourite food is Chinese too?’” Her husband was “endlessly mystified” at how she could like or not like a particular donor — “but again and again this was the case, regardless of all our efforts to make it a rational process.”
