I have frozen 22 eggs that I’m not sure I’ll use – but selling them is a step too far

Four years ago, I went through the effortful process of egg freezing. Since then it’s become big business

Given that the cost of everything else has shot up, it’s probably only fair that the cost of eggs rises too. But we’re talking human eggs, not chicken eggs. Last month, the HFEA (the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority) announced that the compensation paid to women who donate their eggs will rise for the first time in over a decade, from £750 per round to £985. A rise of over 30 per cent. Note that I say “compensation”, not fee. The official bodies get upset if you call it a fee because there cannot be any suggestion that women are being paid for their biological material. The money paid is merely compensation from whichever clinic the woman decides to use for the time and effort involved.
It is a lot of time and effort; several weeks of taking hormones to encourage your body to produce as many eggs as possible before an operation once they’re deemed ready, which involves a needle being poked through your vaginal wall to collect the harvest. Sorry, but that’s the technical term. This is why the HFEA has increased the compensation to nearly a grand, a decent whack of money if you compare it with what men are paid in the UK for sperm donation: just £45 a “go”. Although sperm donation, to be fair, is more arduous than they often make it seem in comedy films, because donating involves a thorough screening process followed by multiple visits to the clinic across a period of months. I once interviewed the chief executive of a sperm bank in Copenhagen who told me they only accept five per cent of applicants.
In 2020, aged 35, I froze my eggs and made a diary podcast of the process to shed some light on what is – for many people – a fairly mysterious procedure. I sniffed one type of drug and injected my stomach with another for nearly three weeks before I went into hospital and the doctor collected 22 eggs. It was exactly the same process that women who donate their eggs go through; the only difference is that mine remain on ice for a possible point in the future at which I want to use them, whereas those who donate are (mostly) giving them up for others to use. I say mostly because some clinics operate sharing schemes where you can undergo egg freezing for free (instead of paying around £5,000 a round, as I did), but only if you donate half your eggs to the clinic for use by other women – an almost Orwellian offer which makes me feel uncomfortable at best, because I wonder whether young women are being taken advantage of.  
Going through freezing was an illuminating and not always reassuring experience which sparked my interest in the booming fertility industry. Because it is unquestionably an industry now, worth billions across the globe as women in every developed country push back the age at which they have children. In 1950, the average first-time mother in Britain was 22; now they’re a decade older. In 1991, 6,700 IVF cycles were undertaken here; by 2022 this had leapt to 77,000 cycles. And it’s not just IVF. Visit any fertility clinic website these days and you’ll find a smorgasbord of choices, including egg freezing, egg sharing, and “Fertility MOTs” for women who want to gauge how fertile they are. Yours for just a few hundred pounds! Business is brisk and, for the clinics, encouraging egg donors to come forward is a big part of that because there’s a shortage. You may have seen adverts appealing to donors on public transport; if you’re a 20-something woman you will almost certainly have been served perky ads on social media encouraging you to donate your eggs to certain clinics.
“There is a shortage. There’s always been a shortage,” says Sarah Norcross, director of fertility charity the Progress Education Trust. “You don’t need to be a genius to predict that, as the average age of women accessing treatment is going up, the demand is going to increase.” In other words, women are trying to have babies well into their 40s, finding it’s impossible with their own eggs, so look for egg donors instead. According to the most recent HFEA figures available, just 28 babies were born from donor eggs in the UK in 1991; by 2019, this had risen to 1,097 babies, or an increase of nearly 4,000 per cent. Will the rise in compensation encourage more egg donors to come forward, I ask? Norcross says she doesn’t believe it will, adding that the hike is merely to match inflation.
I have some worries about the rise in compensation, though. Not because the women who choose to donate don’t deserve it. They do; it’s right to pay them; it is an immensely generous and altruistic thing to do. For one episode of my podcast, I interviewed a woman called Elaine Chong who’d donated her eggs to a London clinic aged 25 in 2017 because she’d recently learned that there was a shortage of ethnic minority eggs in the UK, and she simply wanted to help those who may be looking for them. The letter she’d written to any children subsequently born from her eggs started “Dear egg”, and told those children that if they ever felt lonely, they should remember how very loved and wanted they were to have been brought into the world. Elaine was eloquent and impassioned and delighted by the idea that she would be helping others. Great. Good for her.
I’m uncomfortable, however, about clinics targeting young women for their eggs so that they can sell them at a considerable profit. “Egg donation is a kind and generous act which helps other people create a family,” says the London Egg Bank website. This is the UK’s biggest egg bank with 224 donors currently listed on its site. Its director, Dr Kamal Ahuja, tells me that the average age of their donors is 25, the average number of eggs they collect per cycle is between 11 and 13, and they |”encourage” three cycles. This means that the donor would be paid £985 three times, or £2,955 in total. It’s not a bad sum, especially if you’re a 25-year-old struggling to pay rent or your heating bill. Many, I’ve no doubt, are donating because they want to help, but if I was looking for cash in my 20s and I was targeted on Instagram and offered this money then, well, maybe. 
Also, if you’re a 40-something woman looking for a donor egg, the London Egg Bank will sell you 10 of these eggs for £9,000, plus you’ll need to fork out another £6,050 for the treatment. It’s a pretty decent mark-up. Other egg banks and clinics across the UK also sell donor eggs for several thousands of pounds, while the compensation paid to the young women giving up their genetic material remains the same, £985 per round, because this is the law.
A London-based embryologist I talk to says that her clinic has “mostly” used eggs imported from Cyprus for the past two years, adding that several clinics in the UK are doing the same. Young women, she says, are coming to these clinics in Cyprus to donate their eggs because clinics will compensate them up to the same amount – £985 – if those eggs are imported for use in the UK. She also queries whether some of these clinics have a limit on the number of rounds that women can go through. “Some of these girls could be doing six cycles for nearly £6,000. It’s crazy if you didn’t think that their motivation was financial.”
The same has been happening with sperm banks for years; in 2020, we imported almost half the donor sperm used in the UK from America and Denmark. Now it’s increasingly happening with donor eggs. But at what cost to the women involved, and any children born from their eggs who may knock on their door 18 years later? I’ve no doubt that if you put yourself through the ordeal and cost of IVF using donor eggs and/or sperm, you very much want that child. But the lack of international regulation governing donations is troubling. 
In July, Netflix released the documentary The Man with 1000 Kids, detailing the extraordinary story of Jonathan Meijer, the Dutchman who has donated to multiple clinics across Europe, as well as to women privately, creating a scenario where he’s estimated to have fathered over 1,000 children, and possibly as many as 3,000. Egg donation being so much more difficult, we couldn’t possibly face the same numbers with a single egg donor. But the lack of international regulation and transparency still applies – if eggs are increasingly being imported into the UK from abroad, how much does the recipient really know about the young woman they came from?
Meanwhile, I remain undecided about what to do with my own eggs. I’m 39, and still not sure whether I want to have children. “You’ve got 10 years,” counsels Gemma*, a woman I speak to who has a five-year-old daughter from a donor egg and sperm. She means that, because I froze my eggs when I was 35, and because Gemma had her daughter when she was 48, I still have a few years to decide. Freezing has, potentially, given me that luxury.
Gemma tried to have children with her own eggs at 42, before realising it wasn’t possible, so then started looking for donor eggs and sperm having spent some time trying to get her head around the idea. She used a UK egg bank, in the end, is now a single mother by choice and calls the process “life changing”. “It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me, and I’m so glad I got over that mental hurdle.”
She’s been honest with her daughter about where she came from, helped by the advice of a British organisation called the Donor Conception Network, and says she’d be happy in due course if her daughter wants to try to find her donor parents. As she speaks down the phone, I can hear her small daughter chatting away in the background. Could I be as generous and altruistic in the future, and give mine to someone who desperately wants them? Rather that than a clinic make a whopping profit from them, but I’m still unsure. Although, as Gemma says, at least I have some time to think about it.
*name changed.
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