Why we’re open about using donor eggs

Recently, I posted on Instagram about how I had explained egg donation to my new osteopath. (That particular post was about the correct terminology when discussing third-party reproduction, but that’s a topic for another day.)

My post apparently hit a nerve with one woman, who commented that she discovered as a pre-teen that her parents had used a sperm donor. She was clearly in a lot of pain still, saying that she wished she had never found out, and that she wished others didn’t know that about her, as she didn’t think it was anybody else’s business.

Obviously we want only the best for the baby we fought so hard to have, and I appreciated her point of view, so I wrote a long response acknowledging her pain and explaining our carefully considered reasons for our openness. However, when I went to post it, I discovered that she had deleted her comment. I still don’t know what changed her mind about posting, but I’ve been meaning to write a blog post on this topic anyway. So here I will explain our reasons for being open with our daughter, our friends/family, and the wider community, with the acknowledgement that every situation is different.

Should we tell our child?

When I was first researching egg donation, my googling quickly led me to articles on whether or not to tell any child conceived this way, as that’s obviously the first concern for most people.

What I learned was that if a person discovers at some point that their origin story is not what they thought (like my commenter), this sudden realization can indeed be quite traumatic. The discovery may be on purpose, such as if the parents have chosen some set time to reveal the information, but it could also be on accident, such as from a discrepancy in their medical history, from a relative letting it slip, or from the genetic testing (e.g. Ancestry.com) that’s becoming increasingly popular. In order to best avoid any (intentional or unintentional) traumatic revelation, the experts therefore recommend ‘early telling’, where you tell your child from a very young age (using, for example, the wonderful children’s book Happy Together: An egg donation story). This helps ensure that your child doesn’t have a specific moment in their life when their whole identity suddenly changed.

Should we tell our family/friends?

Once you’ve decided to tell your child from a very young age, you can’t guarantee that the information will stay private. We’re talking about little kids, after all (like my friend’s 5-year old, who recently emerged triumphantly from the bathroom announcing “My dad went POOP!”) But should you actively tell your family and friends?

In our case, our egg donor (Marie) is a close friend from my childhood, and her husband is my grad school roommate. Our families are friends, and many of our close friends are mutual. Partly due to the logistics of getting she and her husband to Europe for the donor screening — and then again (+2 young kids) for the several-week-long egg retrieval process — we were open with our families and friends from the beginning. In a true act of support, Marie’s mother even generously paid for their flights.

Even if logistics weren’t a factor, we were excited to tell our families and friends because of the beautiful gift that Marie was giving us. We didn’t even know if it would work at that point, but Marie’s offer had made us feel loved and supported — the importance of which cannot be overstated after a lonely four-and-a-half year battle with infertility. Our family and friends rallied around us all, waiting with bated breath to see if it would work. And now that it has worked, our daughter will get to meet the nice lady, “Aunt Marie”, who helped mommy and daddy have her (and who has already mailed her a Christmas present for this year!)

Should we tell other people?

I read somewhere that 10% of IVF pregnancies in the US use egg donation, which is non-negligible. Yet when we first started considering this path, I’d never heard of anyone who had done it. Marie told me later that before I mentioned needing donated eggs (not hers, but generally), she didn’t even know it existed.*

It was a scary new path to embark on, and one of the things that helped my husband and I decide to pursue it was finding other women who had children through egg donation. Seeing the relationships they had with their children — and how their children (some of them now adults) were thriving — gave me hope, and it made me want to give back in the same way by sharing our story with a wider community. In the words of a friend of mine, I wanted to help those who came after us by making the path a little less scary.**

With that said, it’s not like there’s a banner flying over our house saying “Come see the donor egg baby!” I would love to show my face on here, as well as that of our baby (because guys, she’s gorgeous), but for the sake of our daughter, I’ve made the choice to keep our identities semi-private. (This may come as no great surprise, but my name isn’t really ‘Allie’, and our egg donor’s name isn’t really ‘Marie’.) Because Marie and I both post about it on social media, it wouldn’t be too hard for mutual friends who don’t already know to make the connection. But while I don’t plan on volunteering additional identifying information to the world in general, it’s my hope that our story will help other people even if all of my Instagram photos feature giant emoticons plastered over our faces.

Every case is different

Would we have done things differently if we had used an anonymous donor? Or sperm/embryo donation? Maybe. Maybe not. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s difficult to say how you might handle a situation until you’ve really experienced it first-hand. And on top of that, every particular case really is different.

Since we made the conscious choice to be so open about our particular story from the beginning, we are running the risk that some people may indeed look at our daughter differently. I can’t control what those people may say to (or about) her in the future, and like any mother, that thought pains me. But I hope that whatever others may say, our daughter recognizes that her differences make her even more special. Because it’s ultimately a story about love, and how so many people came together just so that she can exist.

xx

* Marie actually volunteered to be our surrogate before she knew exactly what our fertility issues were. I explained that the oven was working just fine — I just didn’t have any dough.

** Like me, Marie is also excited to educate others and recently gave a presentation about egg donation at the high school where she teaches. Just imagine if she inspired even one student (or teacher) to donate eggs in the future!

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