Becoming an Egg Donor

Even after passing the initial screening, women can wait months before beginning the actual donation process. In most anonymous donations, the fertility clinic or egg broker will add them to a long list of potential donors waiting to be matched to recipients. Egg brokers only match donors and recipients; whereas fertility clinics also provide medical services.

Taking hormones

The medical treatment begins once donors are matched to recipients. First, a donor is prescribed birth control pills for a short time to put her menstrual cycle in sync with that of the recipient. She will then start daily injections of hormones intended to stimulate her ovaries into producing an overabundance of mature eggs. For the next three or four weeks, she must make frequent visits to the fertility clinic to determine when the eggs will be ready to be retrieved.

During the hormone treatment, there can be significant medical risks for the donor. Sex can sometimes be painful and dangerous since the ovaries are swollen with maturing eggs. Multiple pregnancies are also a strong possibility before the eggs are removed.

Derek says that the hormone treatment was the most uncomfortable part of the process. She was hyperstimulated since the hormones made her produce almost 30 eggs. "I was very bloated," she says. "It was often hard for me to lie down and sometimes even just breathing was uncomfortable. And my emotions were a mess."

About one in ten women will experience mild ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), a condition in which the hormone injections upset the body's fluid balance. Mild OHSS causes abdominal pain, diarrhea, and swelling. Approximately 1% of women will end up in the hospital with severe OHSS, which can cause kidney failure, fluid build-up in the lungs, and shock. Occasionally, OHSS can cause permanent infertility or death. Even if no immediate problems are experienced, doctors don't know much about the long-term consequences of the hormone treatment, and some research has suggested that egg donors may have an increased risk of ovarian cancer.

Extracting the eggs

Once the eggs are ready to be extracted, donors are heavily sedated and 10-15 eggs are extracted with a large needle inserted into the ovary through the vaginal wall. Derek describes the egg retrieval as relatively easy and painless. The procedure takes about 30 minutes, and donors usually experience some pain and discomfort for a couple of days after the surgery. It took Derek about ten days to recover the first time, and she says that the recovery period was shorter for her subsequent donations.

But donating eggs multiple times did take its toll on Derek. After her ninth donation, she started to become depressed which she thinks was due to a hormonal imbalance caused by the hormone treatments. "The depression became more and more severe," she says. "It just got worse until I couldn't leave my bed and had to see a doctor. I believe it was linked to my repeated egg donations since there was nothing else going on in my life at the time that could have explained why I became so depressed."