By Ruthie Ackerman
I sat with my back against the bed, my laptop opened on my thighs. I’d been hunched over in one place for so long that the heat from the bottom of my computer had penetrated through my thigh fat, down to the muscle until my leg radiated with numbness. But I didn’t care. I’d been meandering through the corridors of the internet like a bad dream, opening every door in the dark hallway, and when I didn’t find what I was looking for, I slammed it shut and ran for the next one. And the next one. Until I was frantically opening and closing so many doors that I didn’t remember which I’d already opened, and I was running in circles, spirals, figure eights, chasing I didn’t know what anymore.
I landed in a Facebook group, one of several I’d found over the last few months. A common vocabulary carried across these groups, one that identified those who used donor eggs as “warriors” and “survivors.” The language reminded me of cancer. The women who donated their eggs are “angels.” The children born are “miracles.”
It was as if these women needed to cheer themselves on, convince each other that they were not only just as good as other women who have babies “naturally,” but better because they’d suffered so much to get to the land of motherhood. I empathized with them. I understood their need to prove they weren’t imposters, fraudulent. I understood their need to prove they weren’t selfish, that they hadn’t worshiped their careers for too long and then suddenly scrambled to buy their way into motherhood.
As women continue to start their families later in life, egg donation will keep soaring. There will be even more women, like me and those I met in these online groups, who are considering donor eggs as an option and trying to understand what it means to carry a fetus created from someone else’s egg.
Part of the reason that women are turning to these forums to seek answers to their questions is that the field of egg donation is so young. In fact, it started in my lifetime. Until 1983, when the first pregnancy from egg donation took place, the person who gave birth to you was the person who gave you your DNA. There wasn’t a dividing line between biological mothers or bio-moms (the person whose body you come from) and genetic donors (the person whose genetic information is used to create an embryo). Now we have a whole new language, a whole new worldview, a whole new set of questions and concerns.
Before my husband, Rob, and I sat down to talk about whether to use donor eggs, I had plowed ahead, calling all the top fertility clinics to find out about their donor egg programs. My journalism training means that even in my personal life, I can’t take off my reporter hat. I pulled together a spreadsheet on my computer that outlined everything I’d learned so I could share it with Rob. Some of the clinics wouldn’t allow us to see any photos of the donors. Some would let us only see baby pictures. Others worked only with fresh eggs from donors who had just had an egg retrieval. Still others only used frozen eggs. There was even a clinic with a money-back-guarantee program. I felt a bit grossed out even saying those words, like we were treating making a baby like a Black Friday deal at a big box store. This was a human life, not the newest iPhone, but there was something reassuring all the same that we wouldn’t be spending still more money only to come home with no baby.
Late one afternoon, as dusk was gathering outside, I said to Rob, “If we’re going to do this, it’s really important to me to see photos of the donor.” I had, you’ll note, skipped over the part about whether we would use donor eggs at all and instead focused on the nitty gritty of the process. “I want the donor to seem real to me. I want to feel like I know her. Or at least feel that she’s someone I’d like to get to know.”
But Rob wasn’t sure he wanted to know what the donor looked like. “I don’t want to picture this other person every time I look at our child,” he said. “We will be our kid’s parents, not the donor.”
By the time we were talking about all of this, I’d spoken to an acquaintance who had paid extra for donor eggs from a woman who had gone to an Ivy League university. But now Rob and I discussed how we were pretty certain that the education level — and the prestige of the college someone attended — meant nothing when it came to intelligence. Wasn’t where most of us ended up going to school somewhat random or based on factors like wealth that weren’t genetic at all? Would Ivy League eggs really guarantee us a more intelligent child? And if so, how important was intelligence to us?
Another acquaintance had paid thousands of dollars extra for eggs from a Jewish donor. I’m Jewish. Rob isn’t. Should I care about whether our donor is Jewish, too? I wondered. Would a Jewish donor mean our child would be that much closer to me genetically?
It was the middle of June and hot as hell as Rob and I sat in Dr. Sasson’s windowed office at Shady Grove Fertility in Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania. Dr. Sasson was one of the fertility doctors I’d researched whose clinic offered a money-back-guarantee program for donor eggs. Now we were listening as he spoke slowly, writing every word down, so we would understand all of the complicated details he was laying out for us about the donor egg process.
“We don’t believe the industry standard is fair. Patients going through fertility treatments do not have enough viable financial options,” he said. “Instead of charging twenty-five thousand dollars and up for each treatment like other clinics, our base price is thirty-two thousand dollars for up to six rounds, but if you don’t get pregnant we’ll return your money, no questions asked.”
I let his words sink in.
“So how does this work for you?” Rob asked bluntly. “How do you not go bankrupt?”
Dr. Sasson placed a blank sheet of paper in front of us and jotted down some numbers. “Let’s see,” he said. “Most women, upwards of 60 percent, get pregnant on the first try with an egg that has been genetically tested and is found to be normal. We can offer you your money back because we know that more than half the time you’ll get pregnant in round one.”
I nodded.
“For those who don’t go home with a baby on the first try, the number soars to an 85 percent success rate by round two, meaning that 85 percent of our patients go home with a baby on the first or second try.”
The numbers were great, yes, but we’d need to spend at least thirty-two thousand dollars, minimum, to move forward. This on top of the fifty thousand dollars we’d already spent on thawing my frozen eggs and the two rounds of IVF that went nowhere. If we decided to give donor eggs a shot, we’d have spent almost a hundred thousand dollars in less than a year — a crazy amount.
As this new reality settled in my mind, I moved on to my next dilemma. “How would we decide on a donor?” I asked.
Dr. Sasson looked up, his pen no longer moving across the page. “I recommend picking a proven donor, a woman whose eggs have previously led to live births,” he said. His answer disappointed me, but I guess it shouldn’t have been surprising. It was his job to get me pregnant, and getting pregnant is a numbers game, not an emotional one.
I couldn’t help but think about Faith Haugh, the Australian woman, who donated her eggs forty-one times, helping to create nineteen children with her DNA. And the donor whose sperm led to 150 children who are all now connected through a donor sibling registry.
I didn’t have too much time to think about the distance between my emotional reaction and Rob’s, because next thing I knew, Dr. Sasson was drawing three different tiers on his piece of paper. His pen hovered over the first tier — the least expensive — which was the thirty-two thousand dollars he’d mentioned. For that price, he said, “you’d be sharing one batch of eggs with two other families,” and for a second I let myself imagine shadow families pushing our baby’s half siblings — or diblings, as they’re called — on the swings and helping them down the slide. Would we pass them on the playground? Or walking to the grocery store? Would our future child always wonder about his or her genetic heritage? Would we be messing up our child psychologically before it was even conceived?
The second tier cost forty-two thousand dollars, and for that price we’d be sharing one batch of eggs with just one other family. Each of us would get at least six eggs from the donor, which in our case would then be mixed with Rob’s sperm. By sharing with just one other family we’d potentially end up with more eggs, so if we wanted to be certain we could have more than one child, tier two was the way to go. Dr. Sasson scribbled some math on his paper to make it easier for us to understand. If the donor produced twenty-eight eggs and we shared those eggs with two other families, we would each get nine eggs and one family would get ten. But if we paid for tier two and only shared with one other family, we’d each get fourteen eggs, five more chances at striking baby gold.
And then there was tier three, where for fifty-two thousand dollars we’d keep all twenty-eight eggs for ourselves and not share any with another family. The more money we had to spend, the better our chances at success.
Excerpted from The Mother Code: My Story of Love, Loss, and the Myths That Shape Us by Ruthie Ackerman. Copyright ©2025 by the author and reprinted by permission of Random House.