Forgotten Drafts Friday is a ridiculous series I’m running on my blog to go back to those drafts of blog posts that I never finished. This particular one has been sitting in my drafts folder since September of 2016. Here’s what I wrote:
“View profiles of 450 beautiful compassionate college educated women who are interested in egg donation.”
It’s been so long now I can’t remember or find the original source to this, but I’m pretty sure I saw this on a Facebook ad. Beautiful women, like six of them, lined up. It felt vaguely pornish which is why I plopped this into a draft, intending to write about it. I don’t know what, but probably something about how weird it was and how glorifying egg donation is kind of a yucky thing.
I can’t claim to know anything from experience on the egg donor side, but it’s definitely not as glamorous as they make it seem on those ads. I mean, I know what IVF is like and it’s pretty similar—lots of appointments, lots of forms, lots of injections, lots of hormones, lots of bloating, lots of emotions.
In fact, I remember one time one of my friends offered to be an egg donor for me. I reminded her that she’d have to give herself multiple shots a day and she grimaced and that was that. It’s not for the faint of heart. I can’t speak on the intentions of egg donors, but I’d have to guess it’s for the money and to help other people have children. That’s all I’m going to say about that because I’m the one on the other side—the recipient.
Choosing an egg donor was a very strange thing—probably the strangest thing I’ve ever done and that’s including my questionable life choices in high school.
So when I see things like this, these ads with smiling beautiful women, it’s weird. It’s like, hey! DoNaTe YoUr EgGs AnD MaKe SoMeOnE’s DrEaM CoMe TrUe! And it’s a lot more complicated than that. It’s a lot more medical than that. You have to go through some serious psychological testing. You have to go through a barrage of tests. For the legit places at least.
Maybe I’m just sick of the glamorizing of fertility treatments. The egg freezing boutiques, the celebs that get pregnant at 50 and claim they didn’t use an egg donor or surrogate. It’s like it negates what the real experience is like. And there are a lot of egg donors that get taken advantage of or have long term health issues because of their donation history. Sometimes I wonder about my own donor and what she really went through. She was, after all, my clinic’s most popular donor and I was her last recipient. Wild, isn’t it?
I wonder if she was drawn to ads like this, and how she decided to become an egg donor. I wonder what her life is like now.
Other fun forgotten drafts
Let it go…LET IT GOOOOO!! (No, seriously, let it go.)
Thank God Billy Gillman’s back
I appreciate this post. And I have to admit I was kind of hoping that it would be a little more on the shadow side, like egg donors have this perfect, shiny profile and in reality they are human beings and likely have plenty of flaws and likely would not have done it if they didn’t need money, which doesn’t make it not a wonderful thing that I’m grateful for but they’re not saints, you know? But I’ve been seriously engaged with the process of donating our embryos and sharing our donor information and it’s brought up tons of stuff for me, so it’s good because I’m working through it but it’s also tough. I love my daughter more than ever though, and I more and more feel our forever bond. I am hers and she is mine forever till the end of time.
Author
Things can just get complicated with fertility stuff, right? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of black and white when it comes to things like this.