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When Eloise Drane spotted a small classified ad for egg donation in a San Jose newspaper in 1998, she had no idea it would set her on a path that would change the landscape of fertility care for Black families. Long before founding Family Inceptions, a surrogacy and egg donation agency in Georgia, Drane was already imagining herself as a donor—and discovering just how few women of color were represented in the space.
For Drane, the decision wasn’t a dramatic turning point or a single galvanizing moment. It was the quiet but steady frustration of seeing, over and over, how few Black donors appeared in databases. She knew what that invisibility meant for other Black women and families—longer wait times, fewer matches, and the message that their genetic legacies were somehow less valued.
“I remember thinking, that’s something I could probably do,” she says of the ad. Drane, who lived in Atlanta and had recently donated a kidney to her cousin, jotted down the ad’s information. It would be another year before she revisited the idea.
When Drane first...