Egg donation: Make me 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.”

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.”

It is precisely the absence of those ties that haunts Hannah Forth*, 54, another egg recipient in Toronto. When her twin boys, now eight, were conceived, it was thanks to an anonymous egg donor. Now she speaks wistfully of the connection she and her husband were never able to establish with the woman who changed their lives so profoundly.

Sometimes it feels like there are five people in our family, the four of us and the woman’s ghost, which floats around the house from time to time,” she explains, choking back tears. Back in 1999, even before Canadian laws were tightened, finding an egg donor did not involve choice, it was about luck. “The doctor told me he would find me an egg donor, and he did. I miscarried and had to wait four months before he found me another donor,” she says.

Grateful for a second chance at motherhood, Forth didn’t ask questions, and is relieved she “hit the jackpot” with the twins. But last year they began talking about what it would be like to meet the donor. “There are times when I look at my children with thoughts that a certain characteristic probably came from her. I wonder what type of personality she has, what hobbies she has. I wonder if my kids look like her, and what her own kids look like. I wonder if she wonders about us?”

That is one request not granted at the Washington Fertility Center. “This is strictly an anonymous program and if the couple or the donor wants to have a chat, we tell them this is not the place for them,” stresses Ondr. Photos of many of the donors are available, and some minimal, indirect contact is allowed through Ondr.

“Sometimes couples will want to send the donor a thank-you letter or a small gift, like flowers.” Sometimes donors will also send a note to recipients, she adds, reading a little card on her desk: “Dear family: If Susan gives you this card, it means you are pregnant and expecting a wonderful new addition to your family. My sincerest congratulations and best wishes for the years of love to come. Your donor.”

*Names changed by request

This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of More