Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (23 page)

Although several of the older donors had contemplated some sort of meeting in the future, Nathan was the only man I interviewed who had actually met children born from his donations. In what the Gametes Inc. staff said was an extremely unusual turn of events, Nathan agreed to be in touch with several different recipients when their children were still quite young. At the beginning of the correspondence, all letters went through bank staffers, who excised any identifying information, but Nathan grew impatient with this arrangement and asked if he could just e-mail directly with the recipients. E-mails led to phone calls that led to conversations via webcam and then, the weekend before our interview, to a “family” reunion on a beach a few hours away. Nathan joined two families, both headed by lesbian couples, who had conceived children with his sperm and were vacationing together. He recalled his initial conversations with the children: “When we meet up, ‘You’re my dad?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘I’m your son?’ ‘Yes, you are.’ ‘Well, let’s go play.’ And off we go. It’s like nothing to them. It’s readily accepted.”

Like most other donors, Nathan was originally interested in the money he could earn from donation. That was fifteen years ago. “I was in school, going to work, and I heard this advertisement on the radio on how to make extra money. Great, no problem. Make extra money by just
tossing off. Fantastic! So there was no real thought of children or offspring down the line or consequences or benefits at all, from any of it. It was just a go-in-and-do-what-you’re-normally-going-to-do-at-night and get paid [
laughs
].” Within five or six years, however, he faced a “turning point” about whether he wanted to continue donating sperm: “I don’t plan on getting married. I have no aspirations to get married. I have no children of my own, and I’m not going to raise children by myself. So, the question was, do you really want to keep doing this? Do you want to have more children out there? Why not? I mean, it’s a great thing. So, I just kept on going. They still gave you money, but the money was no longer a deciding factor.”

At thirty-eight, Nathan was unmarried and still working odd jobs. Although he would like to have children of his own, he did not want to do it by himself, nor did he feel financially prepared. “It wouldn’t be fair to the kids, because I couldn’t give them everything they need, not right now.” So as recipients were in and out of touch as their own lives changed, Nathan looked forward to meeting more offspring. “It kills me to know that there are more out there that I’ll probably never meet, because I want to see them when they grow up, how they progress, and how they change through life, if they go through the same things and handle the same things that I did, the same way I did.”

At the same time, he was very aware that his presence in the children’s lives is at the discretion of their parents. In summing up his experiences as a sperm donor, he said,

Getting letters and pictures, you’re elated. You’re happy. You got this new sense of being, this new purpose, but it’s just out of reach. You can’t do anything with it. I got kids. That’s great. I can go make more, but that’s as far as it goes. Fuck [
laughs
]. It kind of leaves you hanging, wanting more. You want the parents to be calling you right then and there going, “Hey little Nathan, [
imitates a baby crying
] that’s your kid.” You want to be a part of it, but you know you can’t, not unless they invite you into that world. And you have to be really careful once you’re in. You can’t step on toes and whatnot. And that brings it up to this point, where I’m actually being kind of rolled into the fold. It’s like being rolled into a wave. You know where you are, you know your situation, but you’re not exactly sure how to kick yourself up left or right. It’s all new.

Nathan was very unusual among sperm donors in that he had met the children and placed so much emphasis on his relationship with them, but he was not at all unusual in calling himself a father to these children, in considering the children to be “his.” Although the conceptualization of this paternal role may change alongside a donor’s changing life circumstances, younger men and older men, those who have children of their own and those who do not, are fairly uniform in identifying themselves as fathers to children conceived with their sperm.

“JUST AN EGG”

Most egg donors, who have exactly the same genetic relationship to offspring as sperm donors, come to the opposite conclusion: they are
not
mothers.
⁷
In interview after interview, women used similar phrasing to define their contribution as “just an egg.” Tiffany, a twenty-five-year-old divorcée who had no children of her own, was in the earliest stages of donating. She was matched to recipients she was meeting the following week, but she had not yet begun injecting fertility medications. Here, she relies on a comparison between eggs and blood in explaining why she felt no “attachment whatsoever.”

There is one friend that does not like the fact that I’m doing [egg donation]. She said, “I don’t see how you can do that. There’s going to be a little Tiffany running around.”
⁸
And I don’t consider it that way. I mean, I donate my blood. I don’t consider my blood being out there in any way. I don’t feel an attachment whatsoever. It’s not like I carried the kid. If I carried the kid, I could see an attachment, and I would consider it a little me running around. But just because it’s my egg, I don’t consider it me. I mean, it is a part of you, but you don’t have a bond with it. Like if you scrape yourself and you lose some blood, you’re not thinking twice: clean that up. You don’t think, “Oh my God, I’m leaking! That’s part of me. Get it all up, and save it.” So that’s the same way I feel about the eggs. You don’t have a bond. You don’t want to save it. It hasn’t developed into anything to love at that point.

The same age as Tiffany, Carla was married with a young child. She was going to school and working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when she
saw an ad offering $5,000 to become an egg donor. She had finished her first cycle about a year before our interview. Although she believed that “having kids is big and would wish that for anybody,” she identified the offspring as the
recipient’s
child, pointing to the importance of “giving” in explaining why she felt “no connection.”

Carla: When it actually comes out of my body, it’s just a little seed. This whole thing nine months later, I make no connection with that to me. That’s their child, and thank God they had that child.

Rene: How does it go from this little seed that comes from you to their child?

Carla: I don’t know. I think it’s just giving. I think if I went out and painted somebody’s house, I put all the sweat and had the pride of doing that, but then they live in it. It has nothing to do with me. That’s their house, and I’m so glad that they have a nice painted house. But I’m not going to drive by every day and say, “Ooh, I painted that house.” After that, it has nothing to do with me. I have the satisfaction of knowing that somebody is happy, and that’s it.

There is a seeming contradiction between egg donors who describe what they are giving as a “huge” gift and then say in the very next breath that it is “just an egg.” Yet Carla’s quote makes clear that it is the possibility of a child that makes egg donation “huge” while what it is that egg donors give—“a little seed” or “a couple of cells”—is small.

It follows logically that women who do not feel attached to their eggs as long as they are gestated in another woman’s body would find the prospect of surrogacy daunting. In fact, nearly three-quarters of the egg donors mentioned surrogacy at some point in the interview, with most echoing Kim in stating their absolute unwillingness to even consider the possibility.

I think I would be too emotionally attached. I cannot imagine somebody growing inside of me and not keeping it. I would never consider being a surrogate. Ever. Not even for a brother or sister. I love them to death, but I don’t think I could do that. Being an egg donor, it’s not a tangible thing. It’s not in me. I mean, it came out of me, but it’s just like giving blood. You’re giving something away, and you don’t see it again. It goes into somebody else’s body. It’s gone.

Rosa, a thirty-two-year-old mother of four, was the only egg donor I interviewed who had also been a surrogate mother. As a gestational surrogate, she did not provide the eggs and thus had no genetic connection to the fetus she carried. Here, she describes the path she took from blood donor to egg donor to surrogate.

Before anything else, the first thing I did was donate blood. You hope you get a good nurse that will get your vein the first time. You go in with the expectation of coming in and out right away, and then I get that Girl Scout kind of feeling in the end, like hey, I feel good about myself. The egg donation is really, really different, because it’s more personal. It’s a bigger thing. It’s more directive of a uniqueness. You’re going to do something specifically for an egg for somebody else to carry. It’s not like the blood; you don’t know where it’s going to go. You have your blood in somebody else, and they go on with their life, but you’re not creating a life. You’re just maybe prolonging a life. [In egg donation] you’re making that one connection that hopefully will cling on and that life will evolve. It will create somebody. With blood, I didn’t think I was ever going to do egg donation. It kind of goes into steps, and then the biggest step to me was the surrogacy. So it’s just like boom, boom, boom!

Rosa donated eggs through OvaCorp, which is part of a company that includes a surrogacy agency. After Rosa’s two egg donation cycles, the donor manager at OvaCorp called to ask if she would consider becoming a surrogate mother. She thought it over, discussed it with her husband, and decided to meet the prospective recipient couple. As an egg donor, she had not met the recipients, and she contrasts that experience with surrogacy.

[In egg donation,] you have a little cramping afterwards, and then okay, hey, well, that’s it. It’s less involved. You just went in for that reason to help somebody out, and that’s it. With the surrogacy, it was so different because of the process. You meet them. You get to know them. You go out with them. You e-mail them. For nine months, maybe a year, your life revolves around them, so you make sure to let them know you’re doing fine. Because if I’m doing fine, then the baby is doing fine. Have you eaten, did you rest, did you sleep, are you okay? And of course, I’m just waddling. I was like this big old mama. It’s just a big experience.

Like many of the egg donors, Rosa distinguishes the eggs that go outside of her body to become part of someone else’s child from carrying inside her body a child to whom she has no genetic connection. At no point did she define herself as a mother to either of these children.

For the last several months of the surrogate pregnancy, Rosa was on bed rest because she was pregnant with twins. During a routine checkup, the clinicians found that one of the fetuses was in distress and ordered an emergency C-section. The recipient couple lived overseas and could not get there in time for the birth, so one of the psychologists from the surrogacy agency was in the delivery room taking pictures. Rosa explained what happened.

We thought everything was going to be great, but the one that had all that stress had Trisomy 18. She was not even going to be compatible [with life]; we just knew it from then on. She lived for three days, and on the 16
^th
, we had to let her go. I didn’t want her to go alone, so out of, I don’t know what it was. It was like a calling for me to be there for the baby. They had to unplug her. I told [the psychologist], “I want to be there; the parents are not here yet. They can’t just let her go. She needs some kind of dignity to leave this world.” So I held her, and they gave me the little quilt to hold her in. She was so cute, just like a little doll, so tiny. [The psychologist] told me I didn’t have to do that. It’s not part of the contract. There she goes with all the papers. I said, “You know what? This is just, it’s my duty to do it, because I carried this child. I want to be there to say good-bye to her.” It was one of the hardest things I ever did. I’d never seen something like that in my life, to let go of a child like that, to just let it go. I just cried and cried.

Rosa continued to stay in touch with the recipients, and the first time they saw each other after the birth was during a layover on their next trip to the United States. Their surviving daughter had just had her first birthday, and when I asked how it was to see her again, Rosa said, “I wanted to hug her! [
laughs
] I was just like, ‘Oh my God, I finally get to hold her again.’ The last time I held her was when she was newborn. She was already trying to walk, and my reaction is just like wow, so fast, she’s already walking. It just grabs you. It just tugs at your heart to know that that little child was in me and to know that they finally have a child. It’s just, it’s a good feeling.”

As an egg donor, Rosa downplayed her genetic connection and emphasized the recipient’s gestational connection, noting the importance of being able to carry the pregnancy and give birth. As a surrogate, she downplayed her own gestational connection in favor of emphasizing the recipient’s genetic connection, identifying the little girl as “their child.”
⁹
Even in her description of the traumatic birth scene, the recipients are “the parents.” Indeed, the only time Rosa used familial language to describe her relationships in this realm was in reference to the surrogacy recipient, with whom she felt “kind of like a kinship, because I guess she’s always going to see me as a person that helped her have a child, and I’m always going to see her like the lady that I helped, so it’s reciprocal.”