The IVF egg donor: ‘I knew I didn’t want children. I’ve just found out I have three’

by Joanna Moorehead – The Guardian, December 20, 2014

Vanessa Traill has never had sex, but last week she discovered she has three children: two girls and a boy. One day she’d love to meet them, but that won’t be for 15 or 20 years and Traill, 36, couldn’t be happier about that. She’s never gone a bundle on babies, and much prefers children when they’re older: in fact it was her lack of maternal instinct that led her to where she is now.

Traill is an altruistic egg donor. She’s one of a growing number of women, according to figures just released by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), who are offering to go through the physically demanding process of having their ovaries stimulated, and the medically invasive procedure to retrieve their eggs, in order to help a woman or couple they’ve never met, and never will, to have a baby.

The new figures show that over the last five years the number of IVF cycles where fresh donated eggs are used is up by more than 50%. Among women over 45, more now use donated eggs than their own when using medical assistance to get pregnant. Other HFEA figures released at the end of October revealed that the number of women registering as altruistic donors has risen every year since 2006.

More than half of those who register are, like Traill, over 30. It was around six years ago that she first started to think about becoming a donor. “I’ve given blood all my life, and I carry an organ donor card,” she says. “So when I picked up a magazine and saw an article about egg donation I thought: ‘I could do that.’ I knew I didn’t want children, and I thought I was probably fertile – and I guess I thought, ‘I don’t want to use my eggs but if someone else can, why not?’”

Traill is gay, though she says she has never had a relationship she wanted to take to the sexual phase. But her celibate status was irrelevant to the egg donation process. When she contacted the Glasgow Centre for Reproductive Medicine(GCRM), which she says she liked the idea of being associated with because it’s connected with Glasgow University where she works as an academic teaching medieval history, staff talked her through the complicated process of giving eggs. She also had extensive fertility tests – and they showed, as she had expected they would, that she had a good egg reserve and would make an excellent donor.

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