A Cell’s Journey
In the summer of 1996, Lisa Grossman and her husband Mike, an antiquarian manuscript dealer, were on vacation in the Adirondacks when she was set to begin injecting estrogen to prepare her uterus to receive donated eggs. Except, as they soon realized, she needed to have her blood levels checked before she could begin the shots, and they were in the middle of nowhere. Improvising, they found a small hospital that promised to send her blood test to another hospital in Albany, which would return the results in time-by 6 p.m.-for her to start the hormones. The results got lost.
“It was a big drama at the time that seemed like life and death,” Grossman said in an interview recently, adding that the results barely came in on time. “But now it’s a funny story.”
It was during the parallel phase of Hadar Cohen’s second time donating in late 2004, when she was already stimulating her ovaries with hormones, that she started having second thoughts. While researching the topic of egg donation for her dissertation, she came across an article that dramatically shifted her perspective. The article, written by A.J. Turner and A. Coyle, was titled, “What does it mean to be a donor offspring? The identity experience of adults conceived by donor insemination and the implication for counseling and therapy.” It was published in 2000 in the journal _Human Reproduction_.
The article detailed stories of children from sperm donors, and how they regard their own identities. The first children of egg donors are just reaching maturity today, while sperm donation dates back to the nineteenth century, according to California Cryobank, a sperm bank founded in 1977. “The descriptions were heartbreaking–the way that they think about how they were conceived in some kind of science lab instead of in bed with mom and dad loving each other,” Cohen said. “Their fantasies about their biological fathers-it was really sad, and I started to rethink the whole thing.”
But it was too late to back out without seriously disappointing the recipient. Dr. Schiffman has found it rare for donors to experience regret following the procedure. Another two-time donor, Anna Osipov, 21, said she doesn’t have any qualms. “I feel like it’s one more good thing to do in life,” said Osipov, an Israeli student who plans to use the money to fund her education. “I’m trying not to think it is my child. I am just helping future parents.”
This do-gooder attitude, once so strong in Cohen, was now lost to her own doubt. But feeling trapped into the procedure, she continued injecting herself with hormones and waited for her ovaries to swell. When she had produced enough eggs, she went in wearily for her retrieval surgery. “That, for me, was the nerve-racking part,” she said. “I was scared the whole time.”
Cohen’s surgery itself lasted 20 minutes. She was sedated with an IV while a doctor inserted a vaginal probe to visualize her follicles, the fluid-filled cysts in her ovaries that contained her eggs. On the end of the probe was a needle that punctured her vaginal wall and then sucked out the fluid in each separate follicle. The fluid was sent to an embryologist, who analyzed it for mature eggs.
The surgery marked the end of Cohen’s services. Upon awakening, she said she felt dizzy, tired, and achy, but was immediately mailed a check for $8,000.
