Testimony by Jennifer Schneider, MD to the California Senate Health Committee re AB 926

My name is Jennifer Schneider. I’m an Internal Medicine physician and the mother of a Stanford student egg donor.  I would support AB 926 if it did what its authors claimed, but it does not.

I’m concerned about increasing the number of women who go through egg donation because of what happened to my daughter. Jessica was an honors student – 6 feet tall, athletic, beautiful, artistic, a non-smoking vegetarian. [Show her photo] One day, she phoned to tell me she decided donate her eggs. She said, “Don’t worry Mom. They told me there’s a small risk of bleeding and infection, but otherwise they haven’t found any problems.”  So she went one cycle without problems; in fact, she did it twice more in the next few months.

About seven years later, Jessica was diagnosed with colon cancer, a disease no one in my family had had.  Two years later, after chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation, she died. She was 31.

After her death I published a 2008 paper in Fertility and Sterility, the official journal of the American Society for...