Asking a huge favour
She found herself naturally leaning toward anyone who looked like her, as if reaching out to her reflection, “while my husband’s predisposition to taller, slim blonds began to take a lead in his choices. The photos he chose began to look less and less like me, while their histories and characters also seemed more and more remote from how I felt about myself, even verging on a type of person I felt no rapport with at all, or just didn’t like. How could he choose someone like that?”
It took Douglas and her husband about nine months, but they finally found a donor in San Diego. It had been an immense project filled with countless questions and obstacles, medical tests, bills and more bills, trips to and from the West Coast, plus numerous decisions and doubts. But in the end she feels they maintained at least some control over their choices, with the clincher being that their donor had agreed to consider meeting the kids one day. A wish list that complete is hard to come by in Canada.
Cindy Tristan*, 45, and her husband had no wish list whatsoever when they were told four years ago they’d have to find their own egg donor. Compared to the average $5,000 fee paid to American egg donors, it is illegal to pay Canadian donors anything other than receipted expenses, putting couples in the position of asking someone for a monumental favour. “We didn’t feel we had huge liberties,” says Tristan, who now has a three-year-old daughter via donor egg. “We didn’t ask for anything, we just asked for someone who was willing to do this for us — that was our only criteria.” Whether through karma or connections, the Toronto couple found two volunteers, and chose a 23-year-old “friend of a friend” who had just finished university. With no catalogues, no photos, no profiles and no wish list, their search took only a couple of weeks. A face-to-face meeting and her clean bill of health sealed the deal.
Intensive screening for egg donors
Back at the Washington Fertility Center, potential donors are run through much more than a battery of tests to rule out infectious and genetic diseases. They’re also interviewed extensively on their family history, and are asked to see a social worker, take an IQ test and even undergo a personality analysis involving 567 questions to help ensure they are good matches with the recipients. Their fertility is assessed on Day 3 of their cycles, at which time they must show evidence of at least 14 developing egg follicles. Anyone who doesn’t measure up gets cut.
Susan Ondr is convinced the intense workup is worth it because she sees the positive results. Couples come back to her with their babies and marvel at how much the child resembles the wife or how similar their temperaments are, despite no genetic link.
For Tristan and her husband, similarities like that are not surprising, whether the donor is “matched” or not. “You struggle with the question of nature versus nurture when you make this kind of decision, and I have a firm belief that the child comes out with sort of a tabula rasa to a certain degree, and your input as parents is probably more important than the genetics,” she says. A wish list of hair and eye colour, along with education and talents “was never on our radar,” she says, admitting the U.S. clinics struck her as “distasteful” and “didn’t fit with what we were trying to accomplish. We knew that we were well informed about 50 per cent of our child’s genetic makeup — and beyond that, we would love this child no matter what.”
It just so happened that the donor matched the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant background of Tristan and her husband, “but it wouldn’t have been a deal breaker if she had not.” For them, a far more important benefit was the donor’s willingness to meet them. “It takes away a lot of the anxiety,” she says. “I have read about parents who don’t know their donor, and they worry about the physical and psychological implications for their offspring. We’re very fortunate that we don’t have that. We do keep in touch — not a lot — but once or twice a year we email or something. I know at some point my daughter will want to know more about her, and we’re fine with that. I’d like to keep those ties open.”
