Breeding donated her eggs six times. Twice these were “altruistic egg donations,” meaning she was paid by the recipient only for her medical and travel expenses. Her payment for the other donations was between $7,500 and $9,000. Out of all these donations, only one resulted in children. That was a set of twins born to a gay male couple in Israel. All she knows about the children is that they were born.
Today, Breeding, who has no children of her own, is struggling with her own compromised fertility. She is facing a hysterectomy because of severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, debilitating conditions in which endometrial tissue grows where it shouldn’t. She’s in chronic pain during exercise, ovulation, and sex.
Breeding’s doctors believe this is the result of donating her eggs, which required pumping her body with sky-high levels of estrogen. Believe is the key word here, as they can’t quite confirm it. There is little research on the long-term medical consequences of egg donation.
She also said such potential side effects weren’t clear to her when she donated. “These were never presented to me as in ‘these are real risks that could impact the rest of your life,’ ” she told me. “I never saw this coming.”
Knowing what she knows now, Breeding would never have donated, even for a substantial payment. “There’s no amount of money that could cover the pain I’m in.”
Source: The ‘Wild, Wild West’ of the American Egg Donor Industry | The Free Press
Read ‘Maggie’s’ story in Broken Bonds (2019 Spinifex Press).
She developed terminal breast cancer after ‘donating’ eggs several times. Women are not told what the massive doses of hormones will do to them.