The Secret Lives of Egg Donors: The Strange Hell Women Go Through to Donate Their Eggs
By Colette Shade,
VICE Broadly
| 01. 17. 2016
Untitled Document
What will a young woman do for $8,000 dollars? Eight grand is the going rate on a healthy woman's eggs, paid to her in a lump sum by fertility clinics. We Are Egg Donors is a website that serves as a repository of stories about the strange hell women put themselves through to receive that lump sum. The stories range from body horror tales that involve "overstimulated ovaries" to anxious frets about the surreal experience of having a child you've never met, and a few feel-good yarns about a woman who met her donated egg baby and formed a special bond.
Ultimately, the site offers women considering going through a rather extreme medical process a little more transparency than most fertility clinics are willing to give. It's that transparency that's made We Are Egg Donors (WAED) a nasty thorn in the side of the fertility industry.
For instance, after would-be donor Kari waited two years to be matched with a couple looking to conceive, she backed out after reading about all the health issues current and former donors...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Lizzy Lawrence, Stat News | 10.14.2025