Jess was aware that I was trying to get pregnant—I had briefly mentioned my first miscarriage—but it wasn’t until my second failed IVF attempt that I came clean about the months of infertility treatments. “I had no idea you were going through all that,” she wrote. “I know it sounds strange, but if I were out in California, I would donate eggs to you!”
I smiled at her idealism, at the stalwart exclamation point at the end of her sentence. She still believed life should be fair, that there was justice. What a difference a nineteen-year age gap made. “Thank you,” I. wrote back. “Your offer brought tears to my eyes, but I don’t think we would consider anything like that.”
Jess wasn’t the only person to say she would spot me a few gametes. My friend Catherine, an English professor in Des Moines, also wanted to help. I love Catherine like a sister. Like me, she’s tall and slim, with blonde hair and blue eyes. We read the same books, share the same politics. And I already knew her eggs did good work: she had two bright, handsome boys, one of whom was my godson, Max. I might have been tempted, but Catherine was already thirty-six; although her second son was born just a year before, the recommended cutoff age for donors was thirty.
“Wow,” she said when I told her, “that makes me feel old.”
“Tell me about it,” I answered.
Steven had been hearing about Jess for years; I read him her letters, tried out my responses on him, especially on the morally sensitive subjects. “I think we should at least discuss it with her,” he said, when I mentioned her latest e-mail. “I’m not saying we’d ever do it, but it seems like at this point we should move forward on all fronts.”
“She’s too young,” I said, ducking the issue. “You have to be at least twenty-one, and she just turned twenty.”
A few weeks later I left for Japan and realized I was pregnant. Then I had come home and got pregnant again. Each time, egg donation seemed blessedly irrelevant, so I gladly let the subject drop. A few months after the third miscarriage, though, when Jess gently reiterated her offer, Steven was more adamant. “We can keep trying on our own,” he said. “But, Peg, we’re getting old. If the point is to be parents, we don’t have the luxury of doing one thing at a time.”
I could have taken this opportunity to cop to my confusion, my distortion, over whether that indeed was the point; I could have confessed to secretly rejecting Koko Kondo. Doing that might have reconnected us as a couple, at least once Steven got over the betrayal. Instead I covered with yet more empty promises: “I’ll talk to Jess about it,” I assured him. Steven and I had busy lives: I was on contract with the New York Times Magazine’, he was traveling back and forth to Santa Cruz, finishing his film. It was easy to let things slide, to let this latest evasion merge into the tension flowing between us, to create yet another eddy of resentment and resistance.
My fortieth birthday once again fell on Thanksgiving, though thankful was the last thing I felt. I looked in the mirror that morning, traced the lines on my face. No doubt about it: I was old and so were my eggs. I’d wasted the second half of my thirties lurching from crisis to crisis, the victim of my body’s whims. Did I really want to lose my forties, too? I needed to let go of my obsession with getting pregnant, but if I did, what would keep me from freefall? I’d invested so much emotion, so much money, so much time … for what? There had to be a payoff.
Tossing away the condoms is one thing. Using someone else’s eggs is quite another. But once you’ve awakened the desire to have a child; once you’ve stoked it in order to convince yourself to submit to drugs and surgery that cost tens of thousands of dollars, once you’ve further added the fuel of frustration and despair, considering an egg donor will eventually, inexorably seem reasonable. Not ideal, perhaps, but… possible. And it’s hard to know, even now: did I really want to have a baby that way, or was I being swept along by a process—one in which, admittedly, I participated—of perpetually raised stakes and overly inflated expectations that I didn’t know how to stop?
Either way, I began toying with a new narrative, one that felt revolutionary rather than compensatory. With a donor egg I could still feel a baby grow inside me, experience its kicks and flutters. I could control—that sweetest of words—the prenatal environment, guard against the evils of drug and drink. I could give birth to my own baby, breastfeed it. Who knew? Maybe for the child, that would make up for the genetic disconnect, maybe it would be less psychologically complicated than coming to terms with adoption.
Jess’s twenty-first birthday was less than a week after my fortieth. When she brought up egg donation again, I mailed her a packet of information I’d collected, along with a letter about my experience with IVF: the discomfort and potential side effects of the shots, the risks of general anesthesia. I also told her I’d want her parents’ approval. “I respect that you’re an adult,” I said, “but that’s the best way I can think of to be sure you wouldn’t have regrets later, that you wouldn’t feel exploited.” Meanwhile, I booked her a ticket to come to California for a weekend. “There are no strings attached,” I told her. “It’s a visit, not a commitment.”
At the airport, we threw our arms around each other—the closest of friends who’d never met. We chattered nonstop on our way to the car, as we browsed the shelves of Sephora in downtown San Francisco, as we walked through the Chinatown gate and up into North Beach. Over foccacia sandwiches and tumblers of raw red wine at Mario’s Cigar Store, Jess filled me in on her parents’ response to her offer.
“They were totally unsurprised,” she said, smiling at my amazement. “Can you believe it? My dad said, ‘I figured you’d want to do that if you could.’ I said, ‘How did you know? I wasn’t even sure myself.’ And he said, ‘I know what kind of person you are.’ They asked a lot of questions about the process and the safety, but they were completely supportive.”
My throat tightened. “If I ever have a baby, I’m calling your mom and dad for parenting tips,” I said. “They’re incredible.”
Back on the street we scaled the phallus of Coit Tower, admired the fairy gardens that grow along the spine of Telegraph Hill. When I was single, these spots were the romantic staples of first dates. As with potential beaux, I couldn’t keep from stepping back from the moment with Jess, observing our time together, wondering where it might take us. I found myself dissecting everything she said, everything she did. Her Italian American features looked kind of Jewish, I decided, though they couldn’t have resembled mine less. Although that was superficial, it bothered me. On the other hand, I laughed at her jokes, admired her ambition, stood in awe of her generosity. I doubt I would’ve had the empathy or selflessness at her age to do what she was doing. I seized on every positive trait, genetic or not. Jess was well-mannered, appreciated her parents. She was a hard worker, too, selling furniture twenty-five hours a week to supplement her college scholarship. And, of course, she dreamed of being a writer, just like me, was already building her résumé through clips for the school paper and unpaid internships. All of that made me feel safer, as if the outcome would be more knowable.
“I do have one question,” Jess said, as we were driving over to Berkeley. “Would you tell the child?”
“Absolutely,” I responded. “Steven and I discussed that we’d want him or her to know you. If you want that, too.”
She looked relieved. “That would be my first instinct, but it’s totally up to you and Steven. If you want me to be involved, that would be great, and if not, I completely understand. You’re not putting any pressure on me to donate, so I won’t influence your decisions about what happens after the fact.”
“What I’d really hope is that your relationship with the child would be like mine has been to you,” I said.
Jess grinned. “That would make me so happy. Especially if it’s a girl.”
I began to imagine a child with Jess’s kindness and Steven’s artistic streak, with her silver-belled laugh and his warm eyes. Steven was considering it, too. “I think her features would mix w
ell with Asian,” he mused that night after Jess went to sleep. We’d each struck on the word “lovely”—not one we generally used—to describe her. Jess was lovely, and perhaps because of that, by the end of the weekend the three of us had fallen into something like love, just as one expects to before creating a family.
The morning that she left, I told Jess we’d like to try on our own a little longer. “I want to give it a year from my last miscarriage,” I said. That would be in September, five months away. “If I’m not pregnant by then,” I took her hand, “Jess, could I have your baby?”
She laughed. I added, “But I want you to know that you’d be free to change your mind at any point—even the day of the egg retrieval—and I’d understand. It wouldn’t change our relationship.”
“I want to do this,” Jess insisted. “I really do. I have such respect and love for you and Steven. I know you’d be great parents.”
“You realize you could go through all this for nothing," I continued. “The odds are in our favor, but it’s not a given.”
“Well,” she said, “I guess we’ll never know unless we try.”
Dr. Dan e-mailed to say that he didn’t need to see me unless we actually started a cycle. Meanwhile, the clinic’s donor coordinator, Katherine, could answer any questions. She explained that donor cycles were like IVF, except split between two people, one providing the eggs, the other the womb. If we decided to move forward, Jess and I would go on the Pill for a month to sync our reproductive systems, then add a second drug to shut them down so the doctor could artificially manipulate them. A few days after that, Jess would start injections of nun pee and hamster eggs, while I would take a weekly shot of estrogen in my hip to thicken my uterine lining. She could be monitored by a doctor in Florida until a few days before the egg retrieval and would fly home the day after. Steven would do his thing, and when the embryos were ready, they’d be transferred to me. Then I would add a nightly shot of progesterone to my regime to trick my body into thinking it was preggers. If it all worked—and there was a 60 percent chance it would—I’d stay on the shots until the end of the first trimester. At that point, miraculously, my body would kick in and take over on its own for the duration. Easy-peasy.
Naturally, adding that third person to the mix upped our costs—if we were considering an “unknown donor,” who would be compensated for her troubles, they would run well over twenty thousand dollars; with Jess, whom we insisted on giving a token amount despite her protests, they would be closer to sixteen. The clinic also required a legal contract between Jess and us as well as psychological screenings by their social worker to make sure we’d worked out all the ethical and emotional kinks. We agreed to get those things out of the way over the next few months; it couldn’t hurt to be prepared.
“Jess is very mature, far beyond her years,” the social worker said after their session, which she conducted by phone. “I was concerned when I heard how you knew each other—we don’t consider a mentoring relationship appropriate for a known donor—but I can see that it’s much more than that, more like the bond between an aunt and a niece. I’m satisfied that there isn’t any coercion here.”
I didn’t fully share her confidence. This woman had talked to Jess for an hour. She was hired by the clinic, paid by the doctors—what was her motivation to turn away business? Regardless of what she said, of what Jess herself said, I remained uneasy. I believed I did hold a position of power in my relationship to Jess, one I didn’t want to abuse. Was it truly possible for her to make this choice freely? I would never be sure.
There were a host of issues I couldn’t resolve in advance. How could I know, for instance, what I’d feel when someone commented on how little—or even how much—the baby looked like me? Or whether I’d be jealous if the child felt some visceral connection to Jess? What if he or she turned to me someday and said, “You’re not my real mother?” What if I agreed, felt like a fraud? There wasn’t a lot of precedent here, no one among my friends to whom I could turn for guidance. I could let the uncertainty stop me, I decided, or I could stick with Jess’s own words: We would never know unless we tried.
Three more months went by. I was still seeing Dr. Chang, but she’d stopped seeding my visits with photographs. She began to insinuate I wasn’t sincere about reducing my stress, then to directly accuse me of not relaxing enough. Ever the passive-aggressive, I retaliated by canceling appointments at the last minute. One day, after going through the litany of questions about my bowels and bladder, she set down her pen.
“So,” she said, “what do you want to do?”
I considered. I’d been through six months of Clomid, two rounds of IVF, three miscarriages, and a year of acupuncture. We’d spent over forty thousand dollars trying to have what we now called a “biogenetic” child. Each month I was convinced I was pregnant; each month I was crushed when I wasn’t. Each month I had to confront my ambivalence, consider the question yet again: did I really want to be a mother? I wanted—needed—to get out of the spin cycle.
“We’ve been talking about trying donor eggs,” I said, cautiously.
She nodded. “I think that’s a good idea.”
I promised to return to treatment when we started the cycle, but I knew I wouldn’t.
“You should bring in the donor, too,” was the last thing she said to me.
This time, sitting in the clinic’s waiting room, I felt compassion rather than competitiveness. How many of these women had told even their closest friends they were here? How many were on their second or third go-round of IVF? How many were flattened by defeat and shame, yet still unable to stop?
Since our last visit, two years before, Dr. Dan and his colleagues seemed to have picked up a significant overseas trade. Several Japanese couples checked in with translators while we waited, and were promptly whisked away, probably to someplace with nicer chairs. Later I’d find out that IVF was highly restricted in Japan, and although it wasn’t expressly illegal, a government committee of gynecologists and obstetricians forbade doctors to perform donor egg procedures. That drove couples to the West Coast, where a brisk trade in Asian American eggs had developed. The couples returned home pregnant, never mentioning how their babies were conceived. The Japanese were a lucrative clientele, paying upward of fifty-five thousand dollars for their treatments (though that included translators, transportation, and hotel)—no surprise that a number of local clinics courted them. Asian American donors, too, commanded a premium—as much as ten, even twenty thousand dollars a cycle.
We were here for a meeting with Katherine, to work out scheduling and sign contracts; this would be the last step before a final decision to forge ahead. So we were startled when someone else, a woman named Janet, came out to greet us.
“Katherine is on leave,” she explained, cheerfully. “I’m her replacement.”
“She didn’t mention that when I made the appointment.”
Janet smiled. “I took her place last week.” As she motioned for us to follow her, Steven and I glanced at each other. I shrugged, What else can we do?
Janet’s office was two stories above the street, furnished with a featureless desk and chairs. “Would you like me to close the blinds?” she asked as we sat down. We glanced at the office building across the street. Steven’s eyes narrowed. “Why would we want you to do that?”
“Well, some people …” She trailed off, seeming uncomfortable.
“Some people what?” I touched a warning hand to his knee. This woman could be the key to our having a baby, we couldn’t afford to alienate her. “We’re not ashamed of this," he continued. “We’re not pretending that it’s something other than it is.”
Had I been wrong to feel less furtive? Apparently, we’d entered the dark back alley of science. More than thirteen thousand women used donor eggs that year, but most would never tell—not their families, not their friends, not even the child. Secrecy had never crossed our minds; we’d agreed with minimal discussion that a person has the right to know
his or her origins. Not that I thought openness would be easy. My parents, for instance, assured me they would love their grandchild no matter whose genes she carried—both of ours, neither of ours, or something in between. I knew they meant it in the abstract but wasn’t sure they could pull off the particulars. My dad loved to crow, “It’s in the genes!" when one of his grand-kids excelled in school, sports, or music. I worried about how hearing those comments would affect our child. Or maybe I worried about how they would affect me. Yet if we didn’t tell, we’d have to let a daughter believe she was at risk of breast cancer because I’d had it. And what about the pediatrician? My obstetrician? Any divulgence would be a risk. I couldn’t imagine building a healthy relationship with my child on a foundation of deception.
As Janet ran through potential dates, it became clear that she wasn’t familiar with our case, not even the basics. She initially assumed that Jess was for hire, not a dear friend, and was unaware that she lived across the country. I wasn’t pleased, but I let it go. She kept talking as we reviewed a sheaf of paperwork: documents confirming our informed consent, specifying our wishes for disposing of any extra embryos, and agreeing to binding arbitration should legal disputes arise. We signed them all, partly because that’s what people do and partly because we felt we had no choice. We knew it was no signatures, no baby.
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