https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/donate-your-eggs-now-for-a-free-freeze-repent-in-18-years-time-dglflgkp0

Donate your eggs now for a free freeze, repent in 18 years’ time

As a millennial who spends a lot of time on social media, I assumed I was desensitised to adverts. I thought I was ad-blind, until I started being bombarded with posts asking me to donate my eggs. It was a post from the London Egg Bank that first caught my eye, offering a “freeze and share” scheme.

In this country egg donors are only allowed to be paid £750 in compensation, but there’s nothing to stop them being given treatments in lieu of cash — and egg-freezing is expensive. The average cost of collecting and then freezing a woman’s eggs is £3,350. Medication and storage add at least several hundred pounds. To have the eggs thawed and implanted into the womb costs a further £2,500 on average.

The Egg Bank was offering me free egg extraction and two years of storage in exchange for donating half of the collected eggs for use in its IVF clinic. It’s presented as an altruistic project — though in 2021 (the last year for which data is available) the London Egg Bank registered a profit of £784,603. Couples struggling for a child will pay almost anything for a chance at a family.

It’s not just the London Egg Bank that’s on the hunt for donors. Almost all my young female friends have noticed a rise in the number of egg donation ads they’re being served on social media, from places such as Altrui, Care Fertility, Manchester Donors and many more.

One friend tells me she sees them “all the time” and feels as though the companies are competing for business by offering the best services — posts push the £750 compensation alongside a host of other incentives such as fertility monitoring and health checks, often illustrated with smiling families urging women to “gift a miracle”. Another friend says she thinks the advertising frames egg donation “as a second income stream”.

It’s all presented so breezily that you’d think this an entirely uncomplicated business, but it’s not. Young women are asked to give their eggs (an invasive procedure that has its risks) without having any of the downsides flagged to them. Here, everyone is #inspirational, but these egg banks make little reference to the fact that a child may be born sharing your DNA — and that child, your biological son or daughter, may well be in touch in later life. None of the adverts immediately mentions the psychological impact of becoming a mother to a child who won’t be yours. Legally, egg banks have to offer donors counselling, but that’s only once they’ve started the process of donation, and not everyone accepts it.

About 2,700 children a year are born from donated eggs. Since 2005 these children have had the legal right to contact their genetic mother once they turn 18. The first cohort of children to whom this applies will turn 18 this year, and many will exercise their right: biology and curiosity are a powerful mix. I’ve never known my father and, although I was born into a brilliantly loving family on my mother’s side, part of me will always wonder where I got my small nose and my wavy hair, and whether I have a relative who laughs like me.

Professor Allan Pacey, a fertility expert at Sheffield University, worries that the repercussions of this law haven’t been fully considered — although he agrees with the principle. “I worry about whether we have the right support mechanisms in place to make sure this takes place in a safe and supportive environment for all concerned,” he says. “I am still not convinced that we have properly thought this through.” He also tells me he thinks there will be a rise in the number of young women turning to egg donation to ease the strain of the cost of living — women who perhaps haven’t quite understood that, all things considered, a child will be born from their eggs at the end of it, and that it carries more serious consequences than can be conveyed in a chirpy social media ad.

Dr Shailaja Nair, clinical lead at the London Egg Bank, insists that the donors are altruistic and that the financial incentive doesn’t play a part. “Some of our donors just want to help. Those using ‘freeze and share’ may want to have a child in the future … they’re doing something to help, but they’re also getting help. Egg-freezing is expensive — younger women are coming forward.”