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 Gaia Ghirardi, Arno Van Hootegem & K. Paige Harden , Nature Human Behaviour | 09.21.2026
Embryo screening for behavioural traits is no longer speculative. If you want to become a parent in the USA today, you can pay to use pre-implantation polygenic testing (PGT-P) of in vitro fertilization (IVF)-created embryos. PGT-P promises to optimize offspring...
By Ann E. Marimow and J. David Goodman, The New York Times | 09.22.2026
Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday refused to intervene in a high-profile custody battle that involved difficult questions surrounding surrogacy and abortion, leaving in place a lower-court order that gave custody to the biological parents in the dispute.
The case drew...
By Gay Pasley, Essence | 09.04.2026
That is what makes the unfolding case of McKenna West so important. It is more than a disagreement about abortion or a dispute over a surrogacy contract. It asks whether an agreement signed before a pregnancy can become authority...
By Ava Kofman, The New Yorker | 09.15.2026
A WOMAN WHO ACTS AS A SURROGATE, carrying a child for someone else, is said to be going on a “journey.”
Kayla Elliott started her surrogacy journey at the age of twenty-six. She gave birth to a baby girl for...