Egg donor: 'I didn't give away my child. It was just a blob'

Three-parent babies are now legal in the UK and universities are already appealing for egg donors. Radhika Sanghani speaks to a woman who's previously given up her eggs - and discovers why more women might want to do the same

The UK has become the first country in the world to legalise ‘three parent-babies’.
Peers in the House of Lords have voted in favour of an amendment that permits a controversial IVF technique. Genetic material from a ‘second mother’ can now be used to mend DNA faults in an embryo.

Already there are adverts looking for women to donate eggs and become these second mothers. Newcastle University is offering women £500 and wants to start conducting clinical trials.
The procedure would be much the same as for current egg donations. At the moment, women can be paid up to £750 in the UK for giving up some of their eggs, which are typically used in IVF treatment to help women who can’t produce healthy eggs of their own.
Claire Foster, a 30-year-old customer services worker from Nottingham, donated her eggs twice to a local clinic when she was in her 20s.
Here, she tells us why she did it – and why she’d happily go through the process again to help produce a three parent-baby.

Claire's story:

I was 23-years-old when I first donated my eggs. I was young, free, single and planning on going travelling in America. The £250 fee (as it was back then) would come in pretty handy, I thought.
Egg donation wasn't really something that had ever crossed my mind. But a friend at work was having IVF and told me about it. So I went along to the nearest CARE clinic and asked for more information. They talked me through the process and urged me to really understand it.
But I went in like a bull in a china shop. I was determined to do it. It was both the money and the chance of doing something good for someone else - giving them a lease of life. I thought the karma might come back to me at some point in the future.

t might sound bad, but I didn’t really find it that weird to give up my eggs.
When you say 'egg' people think of something incubating and growing. But I saw it more like donating a kidney. I certainly didn’t see it as giving my child away. These were just blobs and I was donating them to someone else because they didn't have their own.

The only thing that did jar slightly? Being asked to write a testimonial about myself, in case the future parents wanted to tell their child something about the egg donor who'd made their life possible. That said, at the time I didn’t really think about the bigger picture. I never considered that someone could contact me one day. That my egg might want to know where it came from.
But I know what my answer would have been: I’m not your mother. I just let someone borrow my cells to help you along.

The process of donating my eggs was quite protracted.
First you have to pass psychology tests to make sure you can cope mentally. Then you start injecting yourself daily to produce more eggs than the normal one per cycle. You have to go in to the clinic every few days for scans to see how many you've got.

The whole thing took a few months. I hadn't realised it would be that long - in my mind you'd just ovulate and go in to have the eggs taken out. But there’s a lot more to it. It does affect your lifestyle in a way. You have to watch your diet. No fizzy drinks, no sun beds, no smoking, no alcohol.
Physically giving up the eggs was actually the easy bit. You go to sleep and 20 minutes later wake-up in a lovely room, surrounded by flowers and tea.

I don’t even really know how they do it - how they extract the eggs exactly. They suck them out of you, I think. Afterwards, you're told that there might be some internal bleeding but it's nothing really.
The big knock-on effect is that the medication can make you really ratty. You go through a few emotional stages before donating the eggs. Your hormones are stripped right down to a minimum. You have PMS-like symptoms. You feel really horrible and groggy. You have to inject yourself every day. If you’re even a bit squeamish, you wouldn’t be able to do it.

Then there are all the scans, which can be annoying if you have a full-time job. But my work were really supportive and gave me the time off. And CARE were brilliant, paying for all my expenses.
My friends and family were all really supportive, too - although my partner didn't really get it and thought it was just 'girl stuff'.
But on the back of my decision, a friend also donated her eggs. We had a standing joke: 'How are yours cooking?'

The first time I donated, the person I was doing it for didn’t actually 'catch' my eggs - they didn't take and there wasn't a pregnancy as a result. I was a bit disappointed. Actually, I felt cheated. Surely that was the whole point? How could it have failed to work?
So I did it again a few years later.

The second time the person didn’t 'catch' either. It made me even more determined to help, but I was warned against going through it for a third time. I might have risked problems for my own fertility.
If I could, I’d donate more eggs to help a ‘three-parent’ baby too. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I think it’s a brilliant idea. You always get people thinking that nature should be able to take its course - but life isn't really like that now. If the procedure can help people, that's better isn't it?
After all, what's the big deal about a few scans and mood swings when you might be able to improve someone's life?
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