Sarah Jessica Parker surrogacy stories raise false hopes for women

By Jessica Werb
Publish Date: April 30, 2009

News broke recently that 44-year-old Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker is expecting twin girls with her husband, Matthew Broderick via a surrogate.

Many of the reports state that the twins were conceived using Parker’s previously frozen eggs, and her husband’s sperm.

That raised questions marks in my mind. I wrote a piece awhile back about the growing demand for egg donors, and how images of Hollywood starlets having multiple babies well into their 40s distorts the truth about fertility. The sad reality is, women’s fertility begins to drop off exponentially after the age of 40.

Many of the doctors I spoke to when researching that piece made it clear that successfully freezing eggs and retaining their viability is not yet possible. One doctor, Bellingham IVF & Fertility Care’s director, Dr. Emmett Branigan, told me: “If they [women] are in their 40s with twins, you can almost be assured it’s a donor egg.”

Which raises a couple of questions: Did SJP use donor eggs? Or did she use left over embryos from a previous cycle of in-vitro?

I suppose it’s none of our business, really. But I do wonder why there remains such a cloud of secrecy around the prospect of using donor eggs. It’s as though this is something to be ashamed of.

If those in the public eye, like SJP and others, would start discussing their experiences openly, it would go a long way in helping us confront the many moral and ethical questions that arise with the use of this technology. As women wait longer to start having families, it’s about time there were more openness and public debate and discourse about the issue.