Keep Your Hands Off My Eggs!

The feminist politics of egg donation

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Once, There Was a “Demand” for My Eggs

As an undergraduate at a highly ranked University, one of the strangest things I noticed was the multitude of flyers seeking egg donors. They seemed to be everywhere—on classroom billboards, littering the sidewalk, in the student newspaper, and online. Presumably, they wanted someone intelligent and young to donate their eggs for large sums. I never for an instant considered it. The procedures seemed invasive, painful, and anxiety inducing. And I would be extremely uncomfortable never being able to see a biological child of mine.

Now, in my mid-30s, I have “aged out” of the egg donor demographic. Now, society is obsessed that I freeze them. Why does society care so much about a women’s eggs?

Egg donor ads rarely list risks of donation, and if they do so, it’s deemphasized. Note the pink ‘girlboss’ sheen.

History of egg freezing

Egg freezing was first developed to help preserve eggs for younger women receiving medical treatments (e.g. chemotherapy) that could affect their ovarian reserve (number of eggs). In 1986, the first pregnancy from a “frozen” egg was reported. The technology used an ineffective technique called “slow freeze”. In this process, eggs were often damaged by ice crystals and had an almost 0% success rate.

In 1999, Dr. Lilia Kuleshova developed a new technology called vitrification (rapid freezing). This technology was more successful and became the standard method for egg freezing. When the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) announced in 2012 that it should no longer be considered “experimental”, egg-freezing skyrocketed. According to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology, there were 7,600 cycles in 2015 and 29,803 in 2022. Because the cost is often not covered by health insurance ($10,000 to $15,000 per cycle) several companies offered loans specifically for egg freezing. Egg freezing became a buzzy multi-billionaire dollar industry, branded as ‘fertility insurance’.

Still, a 2022 NYU Lagone study of 543 patients over 15 years found that the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was only 39 percent.

Shopping for a Baby?

Much literature has been devoted to the ethics of egg donation (122K articles google scholar) and sperm donation (104K articles). Critiques of reproductive politics in the US reached new heights after June 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The legal and ethical landscape surrounding gamete donation became increasingly complicated, especially in regard to the more than one million frozen embryos currently stored in the United States.

In scholarship, the purchase of gametes has been linked to economic inequality and exploitation—a privilege for those who can afford it. And also, a step for the economically desperate, compelled to commodify their bodies.

Rhetoric around gamete donation engage in what Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre et al. (2023) describe as “forms of futuristic racial eugenics” through the selective valuation and marketing of donor characteristics:

The industry has also streamlined the [sperm selection] process, making it as easy as online shopping: “It felt like shopping on Amazon,” one sperm shopper noted, “We chose the donor and clicked to place the sperm in a cart. Once payment was made, we were told it was being flown to our clinic”

Most advertising is, in their words, “heterosexual-targeted,” focusing primarily on infertile couples and constructing a particular image of infertility—namely, that of a heterosexual couple.

Women undergoing egg freezing are typically required to complete far more psychological and medical evaluations and screening than men. Compared to sperm donation—which is relatively quick, often allows for a degree of anonymity (though with DNA testing it’s almost impossible to be completely anonymous these days) and rarely involves direct contact between donors and intended parents—egg donation typically requires a much closer relationship with the intended parents. Egg donors undergo extensive vetting, medical examinations, hormone treatments, surgical retrieval procedures, and interviews, and they may repeatedly encounter intended parents at the fertility clinic.

Women’s bodies and reproductive capabilities also have a long history of policing and coercion. In childbirth, the life of a child or fetus has often been prioritized over that of the mother. Women of color and women with disabilities have historically been subjected to forced sterilization. Similarly, women seeking tubal ligation often face greater barriers than men seeking vasectomies.

Egg freezing and donation are divisive topics within feminist communities. While some argue that these technologies can help “even out” inherent differences in men’s and women’s reproductive lifespans, others view them as exploitative. Even as far back as the 1970s, Andrea Dworkin in Right-Wing Women wrote that:

Again, the state has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in which the sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary to the survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of individual will—the only kind of assertion of individual will in women that is vigorously defended as a matter of course by most of those who pontificate on female freedom. p 184

In 2014 Cattapan et al. wrote that:

As young feminist scholars engaged in reproductive politics, both personally and professionally, we contend that the option of social egg freezing not only is shortsighted but also fails to challenge the very conditions that produce its need. We reject the claim that egg freezing empowers all women by offering a nonproblematic reproductive choice

Egg freezing for future use, which I’ll get into in Part II, is often framed in very sexist terms and has a low success rate which is predatory and misleading to women hoping to have children one day.

Commodifying Egg Donation

In the mid 2010s, I read an article by Justine Griffin called “The Cost of Life: My Experience as a First-time Egg Donor”. I can still remember the desk I was sitting at as I read this, increasingly horrified. She writes candidly about what she thought would be a lovely, altruistic experience. In this case, she was not donating for money, but to help others. She felt that her kindness was taken advantage of.

She writes of handing over her information to the fertility agency, including current photos, SAT scores, her college GPA, her exact height and weight, the texture and thickness of her hair, her favorite subjects in school, her future goals, and her family’s medical history. The agency would later tell her that her features (25, tall, blonde, 3.6 GPA) were very “desirable”. She was very happy to be matched to a couple, and was sympathetic with their fertility journey:

The cost to build your own baby is not cheap. The couple to whom I donated had spent upwards of $150,000 for everything from their own fertility treatments to the medical care of a surrogate. My heart ached for this faceless couple. I wanted to help them.

After agreeing to the donation, she faced more invasive questions, including inquiries about her sexual partners, whether she had ever had an abnormal Pap smear, and how often she drank alcohol. During the hormone injections her hair started falling out.

The day I was to start my own hormone injections crept closer and closer. I was terrified.

While Griffin has no regret that her eggs have been donated, and wanted to do it, she exposes how dehumanizing and grueling the process was. Throughout the article, she points out medical risks she was inadequately informed of and interviewed others who had severe side effects. She wrote that it wasn’t just the nausea or migraines that makes her say she’d never donate an egg again:

“As the medical process went on, I very clearly felt that I was no longer a person. I didn’t feel like a patient, I felt more like a commodity,” she says. “That these doctors - I wasn’t paying them for these services, someone else was - and I was just a tool that they needed.”

Without them, there is no in vitro fertilization, no surrogate mothers, no baby-making business. As it unfolded, I began to feel like a commodity rather than a human being, a means to an end on the infant assembly line.

Other women have been interviewed and wrote that:

I woke up during one retrieval. What I recall is that the doctor was roughly, rapidly, and aggressively plucking my eggs. I could see the image of my grossly inflated ovary on the screen. I protested in some way-called out in pain or said "hey!" His reaction was angry-I felt hostility directed at me; it's possible that the nurse was actually the intended recipient of this anger. Perhaps she hadn't knocked me out sufficiently

The industry of doctors and fertility agencies are rubbing their hands over these donors they denigrate as ‘fertile Myrtles.’

many donors are producing really high quantities of eggs. In many of my interviews internationally, they are producing between 10 and 12 eggs each cycle. Eighteen is considered high risk for OHSS. But here in the U.S., so many of the donors I’ve spoken to have produced 30, 40, 50 eggs. They are being told by doctors and agencies that they are superdonors, ‘fertile Myrtles.’ But the reality is, these superproducing cycles put them at much higher risk for OHSS, which could be prevented if doctors were monitoring their progress throughout the cycle and adjusting their meds so that they didn’t overproduce

The warm, reassuring advertisements of donating life to a grateful couple, is an appealing but simplified fantasy. The recruitment of young college women to “donate their eggs” for what is, in reality, a grueling and rigorous process raises additional concerns. These women, often newly minted adults, may lack adequate legal recourse, outside advice, and medical guidance to navigate the complexities of the process.

Race and Egg Donation

Fertility agencies often target young white, females. White donors are paid more than Black donors.

Constant bombardment for egg donation suggests that women’s bodies only exist for reproduction, especially young women. This implies that young college women are valuable, not for their intellect, the discoveries they will make, their own personality and actions, but for their eggs. It’s no secret they target women at prestigious colleges. Those who did not graduate high school are not likely to be accepted. In 2021, MIT’s student newspaper The Tech railed against the predatory egg donation targeting Asian female students:

If you are a female MIT student with the last name Wu, Huang, or Chen, you may have received an email in the past two weeks with the subject line “亞州精英 Outstanding Asian.” The email offered $50,000 in compensation for an Asian egg donor, ideally a “21-year-old Chinese MIT student, top in her class,” with “several awards in high school and university.”

More disturbingly, there are specific requirements for the prospective donor to have gained a certain SAT score.

On the form Della filled out, she was even asked for her SAT scores. She knows about the pay benefits of being more educated and has considered waiting until after graduate school to donate. She is interested in the money but does have some qualms about the system. She said, “I know Harvard or Stanford eggs are worth more. UC Davis is considered not quite as good. It’s interesting to think that there is someone out there tallying all these points up. It can definitely hurt your feelings for your eggs to not be wanted.”

Such bombardment might beg the question: Am I selfish for never having a child? For letting all my eggs got to waste?

Conclusion

To complicate matters, the entire ‘egg donor’ system is biased, disproportionally favoring eggs from white, young, woman. It’s a complicated feminist issue, with many people for and against. However, wrapped up in a system that does not respect the female body, it is more dangerous. In the patriarchy, women’s lives are meant to serve reproductive purposes. The issue is not egg freezing itself. The issue is how this technology will be used in a system in which women’s fertility is already exploited and policed.