Vanessa Traill has never had sex, but last week she discovered she has three children: two girls and a boy. One day she’d love to meet them, but that won’t be for 15 or 20 years and Traill, 36, couldn’t be happier about that. She’s never gone a bundle on babies, and much prefers children when they’re older: in fact it was her lack of maternal instinct that led her to where she is now.
Traill is an altruistic egg donor. She’s one of a growing number of women, according to figures just released by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), who are offering to go through the physically demanding process of having their ovaries stimulated, and the medically invasive procedure to retrieve their eggs, in order to help a woman or couple they’ve never met, and never will, to have a baby.
The new figures show that over the last five years the number of IVF cycles where fresh donated eggs are used is up by more than 50%. Among women over 45, more now use donated eggs than their own when using medical assistance to get pregnant. Other HFEA figures released at the end of October revealed that the number of women registering as altruistic donors has risen every year since 2006.
More than half of those who register are, like Traill, over 30. It was around six years ago that she first started to think about becoming a donor. “I’ve given blood all my life, and I carry an organ donor card,” she says. “So when I picked up a magazine and saw an article about egg donation I thought: ‘I could do that.’ I knew I didn’t want children, and I thought I was probably fertile – and I guess I thought, ‘I don’t want to use my eggs but if someone else can, why not?’”
Traill is gay, though she says she has never had a relationship she wanted to take to the sexual phase. But her celibate status was irrelevant to the egg donation process. When she contacted the Glasgow Centre for Reproductive Medicine (GCRM), which she says she liked the idea of being associated with because it’s connected with Glasgow University where she works as an academic teaching medieval history, staff talked her through the complicated process of giving eggs. She also had extensive fertility tests – and they showed, as she had expected they would, that she had a good egg reserve and would make an excellent donor.
She made her first donation in spring 2011. “I had to inject myself daily with hormones for nine days, and I had several internal scans to check how things were going.” Then came the egg retrieval. “I had a general anaesthetic for that, though now it’s done with a heavy sedative, and they harvested seven eggs.” It hadn’t seemed too bad, so later that year she offered to do it again, and then twice more in 2012. “Altogether they retrieved 45 eggs,” she says. The discomfort and inconvenience seemed minimal. “I felt a bit bloated during the first round, but the later cycles were much easier because I had different drugs which agreed with me better. It really wasn’t a big deal.”
But it definitely was a big deal for the three couples who went on to have babies using her eggs, as Traill discovered on a return visit to the centre on Friday. “All I know about them is that the babies have been born, and that two are girls and one is a boy,” she says. “That’s all I can be told – although when they’re 18 they’ll have the right to make contact with me if they choose to do so. I feel quite excited about that – I’m curious about how much of them will be nature and how much will be nurture.” It’s possible that more babies will be born from her eggs in the future, because two of the couples have more embryos made using her eggs in storage.
Before she made her first donation, Traill wrote two letters – one to the potential parents, one to her genetic child or children – in which she described herself and the values that are important to her. “In the letter to the parents I stressed how important I think it is that they’re honest with the child and tell them from the outset how she or he was conceived. And in the letter to the child, I stressed how important it was to understand that your real parents are the people who care for you day in and day out and who raise you, not the person who provided the genetic material.”
Marco Gaudoin, medical director of the Glasgow centre, which is part of the Academic Reproductive Partnership of leading fertility clinics, says altruistic egg donation is likely to continue to rise in the years ahead, prompted partly by a change to the regulations in 2011, which means donors now receive £750 for each cycle of egg retrieval. “It’s not that women are necessarily volunteering because they’re swayed by the money, but the publicity around the change has led more women to think about whether they could do it, and we’ve seen a rise in the number coming forward,” he says. For her first two donation cycles Traill received just £40 for taxi journeys to and from the clinic – but for her third and fourth donations she was paid £750 a time. “It was a very welcome boost to my finances, but I would never have become a donor for the money and I don’t think any donor should think of it in that way,” she says.
Gaudoin believes egg donation will be an increasingly important part of the assisted fertility scene in the future, and despite the higher numbers of altruistic donors coming forward, the average waiting time for a donated egg at his clinic is between eight and nine months. “What’s happening at the moment is that more and more women are delaying motherhood until later in their lives, and as you get older the quality of your eggs diminishes. But using donated eggs from a younger woman pushes the success rate right up for older women – it can be the difference between 3 or 4% using their own eggs, right up to as high as a 60% success rate using donated eggs. The thing is that the womb doesn’t age in the way eggs do, so a woman can carry a child at almost any age.”
Over the last few years many donated eggs have come from a practice known as egg-sharing, in which privately funded IVF patients agree to allow some of their eggs to be used for other patients, in exchange for a reduced fee. “Typically the women who donate through egg-sharing will have polycystic ovaries or will have partners who have a low sperm count, so they are able to give healthy eggs to women who can’t produce them,” says Gaudoin. But egg-sharing has its pitfalls, not least that a woman desperate to have a child might fail to get pregnant herself, but end up being told that another woman has given birth to her genetic child.
Meanwhile, Traill says that, occasionally, she allows herself the pleasure of feeling good about having made such an extraordinary difference to the lives of strangers she will probably never meet. “When I was at the clinic I’d be in the waiting room and I’d see couples there waiting for their appointment, and I could see how hard it all was for them. At the end of the day, the bit I did was the easy part.”
HOW IVF TREATMENT IS CHANGING
■ The number of IVF treatment cycles using fresh donor eggs is up by more than 50% in five years.
■ The number of women registering as egg donors has risen every year since 2006 – up from 815 in 2011 to 1,103 in 2013. Clinics have seen an increase in both expressions of interest and donations since the policy change on payment in 2012.
■ Egg sharing is decreasing. Having peaked in 2011, when 708 women registered to share, numbers have dropped each year, with 533 mothers sharing in 2013.
■ Half of all donors are under 30, while a quarter are under 25.
Source: Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
