A Cell’s Journey

On a similar afternoon in September of ‘96, Mike Grossman walked across the street from his apartment to the NYU fertility clinic at 38th Street and First Avenue to contribute his sperm to the already retrieved eggs. The donor, a young acting student, had had the eggs removed early that morning. Just hours separated her from meeting Mike-an intentional barrier set by the doctors to protect their anonymity.

In a dish, sperm and eggs fused, joining Mike’s and the recipient’s genes. Several days later, each tiny embryo had divided into about eight cells. At this stage, doctors selected just two of the most viable embryos, at Lisa Grossman’s request. Ten years ago, four or five embryos would usually have been inserted to increase the chance of pregnancy, but Lisa had a serious desire not to have twins. (Or triplets, or quintuplets, for that matter.)

“It’s hard enough to nurture just one baby,” she said. “I didn’t want to invite more, but the doctors weren’t happy because the statistics were lowered.” Nevertheless, the doctors abided. Before transferring the embryos to her uterus, they showed her a picture of the tiny cells, the first indistinct beginnings of Josh’s life. She went into the transfer grinning in a pink surgical gown and pink slippers, a story Mike loves to recount, saying his wife looked just like Lucille Ball.

“I am a very positive-thinking person and I just decided it was going to work,” Lisa said. “I just decided this was the beginning of me having our baby.”

She was right, though she didn’t know it yet.

With a long syringe, a doctor inserted the embryos through her cervix and deposited them directly in her uterus. It required no anesthetic, and it would not have been painful, Lisa said, except that she has a tilted uterus. This made it difficult to get the embryos in, but half an hour later the transfer was complete.

For the next two months, Mike helped her inject daily shots of progesterone, a hormone the body needs to support pregnancy.

“He is an angel,” Lisa said, “and it killed him. He could not bear it because of causing me pain.” Mike even kept a chart of the day and the shot, a memento they saved for their son of his earliest days.

For 11 days they waited in breathless anticipation until Friday, October 11, at 3 p.m., to find out if their efforts–and about $75,000–had paid off. They found themselves back in familiar territory that day, driving up to the Adirondacks. Cell phones at that time weren’t common, so at 3 p.m., they turned off the road into a restaurant–aptly, it was a Big Boy franchise.

From a payphone, they called NYU. The news confirmed their most profound hope: she was pregnant. The rest was seamless; Josh Grossman was born the following July.

But some recipients aren’t so lucky the first time. Ruth Tavor, now 51, spent more than $300,000 and endured 10 transfers in five years both with her own eggs (in vitro fertilization) and with donor eggs before she finally became pregnant with a donor egg. Then, late in her pregnancy, the placenta ruptured and prompted an emergency delivery of her son, who is now a healthy four-year-old.

Tavor, who founded a Jewish donor egg agency during her pregnancy, remains as positive today as she managed to be while trudging through countless injections and failed transfers. “If somebody said, ‘you can have all the money back, be five years younger and have a baby with your own eggs,’” Tavor said, she would refuse. “I would choose to do it all over again as long as I can have this baby. With no doubt.”

Tavor’s agency, New York Lifespring, recruits Israeli donors through newspaper advertisements, and then sends them to about fifteen hospitals around the country, three of them in New York. Hers is not the only agency seeking eggs of a particular genetic profile; another specializes in “diverse” donors, most of them African American. But Jewish eggs are in especially high demand and short supply, say both Tavor and Dr. Licciardi of NYU. In fact, NYU is even partnered with another Jewish egg agency called the Ovum Donor Registry. Founder Judi Fleishman says she has recruited about 500 women since the agency’s founding ten years ago, mostly through word of mouth and newspaper ads. Fleishman takes a cut of about $3,500 per transfer from the waiting couples, who pay roughly $30,000 for the procedure.