Would a Pregnancy Through a Donor Egg Feel Like ‘Mine’?

I don’t exactly know how we found ourselves talking to a doctor about egg donation. We were in Israel to interview in vitro fertilization experts about their proposed treatment for me, and next thing I knew, we were sitting with the woman in charge of one of Israel’s egg donor programs. Donor eggs were supposed to be our last stop, only after full-force I.V.F. But when my husband heard the numbers, his eyes lit up. “There’s a 60 to 70 percent chance of success for donor eggs,” the doctor said. We had long known about the statistics (although according to the Society for American Reproductive Technology the success rate is 54.9 percent), but we hadn’t yet considered using someone else’s eggs because I kept getting pregnant, and it seemed only a matter of time till we found my one good egg and the right protocol to carry a baby to term.

There’s a strange silence in the world about donor eggs. Many proud older celebrity mothers who grace the pages of supermarket tabloids with their children probably used donor eggs, even though they would never go public about it. (Not that they should: it’s a private issue, yet the secrecy makes it seem shameful.) I hadn’t given it much thought until that meeting because the cost — starting at around $25,000 — seemed prohibitive.

This doctor said that Israel’s egg donor program cost about $8,000 for private patients (less if you’re a citizen), who fly to clinics in places like Ukraine, Cyprus and the Czech Republic for six eggs from a young woman (age 21 to35). She made it sound relatively simple – few drugs, a weekend abroad and poof! I’d be pregnant. I could even do it from the United States.

Solomon, my husband, was ready. It was the math – 50 percent versus less than 10 percent – that swayed him. But he left it to me to make the decision to stop I.V.F. “In the end, it’s your call,” he said.

It was my call because with donor eggs the baby would still carry his genetic material, not mine. I wanted to believe it didn’t matter – I’d still be carrying the baby, nourishing it, birthing and nursing it – and I feel like the worst person in the world when I admit my deepest fear: that I wouldn’t feel like the baby was mine. I wish I could think like my holistic therapist cousin who worked with families and keeps telling me, “Love is the only thing that matters.”

But is it?

The State Department requires that “a U.S. citizen parent to have a biological connection to a child [born abroad] in order to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child at birth. In other words, the U.S. citizen parent must be the sperm or the egg donor in order to transmit U.S. citizenship to a child conceived through ART [Assisted Reproduction Technology].” Solomon is an American citizen, but reading that information felt like a stab in my uterus: a government agency was saying the baby wouldn’t be “mine.”

But that was a straw man. My real concern was the Jewish one. Solomon had hoped in vain that I wouldn’t come across Caren Chesler’s article What Makes a Jewish Mother? Like her, I worried. If I used donor eggs, would I have to convert my child? What would my ultra-Orthodox family think? Of course it shouldn’t matter: I was a grown woman, no longer religious, married to a secular man who thought these religious edicts were bogus, yet I couldn’t shake the (admittedly racist) notion I’d grown up with my whole life, that any baby of mine would de facto be Jewish. I didn’t want my children rejected by the Jewish establishment.

Turns out, it’s a gray area in Jewish law. I turned to a rabbi from the Puah Institute, an Orthodox organization that helps women with infertility. “Some rabbis rule that only the donor mother needs to be Jewish, others rule that the birth mother has to be – and others yet say both have to be,” he said, noting how hard and expensive it was to get Jewish donor eggs. He listed names of respected rabbis, including the recently deceased Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Ovadia Yosef, who ruled that only the birth mother needed to be Jewish. That was enough for me.

“But I’m not convinced you need donor eggs yet,” the Puah rabbi told me after I had recounted our fertility journey. I thought of my friend who, after a botched I.V.F. procedure, was forced to move onto donor eggs. Her children were lovely. But she hadn’t had a choice. I still did.

The rabbi said, “Is there any way you can continue with I.V.F.?”

There was. We would meet with in vitro fertilization doctors in Israel for what Solomon called our last-ditch effort to find my one good egg. If a few rounds of full-force I.V.F. didn’t work, we would take donor eggs. I know one thing: in the end, it will be our baby either way.

 (By Amy Klein)