Today, like many days, my voice-mailbox is full, my calendar booked, my e-mail refreshes frequently with requests from women, men and couples faced with significant infertility. They contact me hoping for my assistance to identify, for them, a healthy fertile woman willing to share her fertility to assist them in successful family building. They are desperate to parent and they are searching for an egg donor. The calls, the e-mails, the inquiries come from my home-town or from across the country and just today one e-mail from France and another from London. Last week, I managed a twelve hour time difference to talk to a couple living in Hong Kong and recently traded messages with another in Greece. 

But who are these women who so generously share their fertility? If you were in need of another woman’s eggs, who would you hope to be your donor? To many, the obvious response is a sister, a cousin or best friend…this is often a best case scenario, I am told by the mental health professionals with whom I often consult. It is also a tremendously complex and often burdensome dynamic to manage.

Donors, whether anonymous or “known” (that is, known to the infertile person or couple) will agree, through a legal document, to relinquish all parental rights to the child. That means the donor remains legally and socially….just a donor.

Despite then, or perhaps because of, the genetic connection, the passing of the sweet potatoes from the (sister/cousin/bff)/ donor to the child at the Thanksgiving Day table can often be, at the very least, awkward and sometimes, even painful. And so, for many folks who find this alternative family building option more appealing than adoption, embarking on a search for an anonymous egg donor seems their optimal path to parenthood.