Written by: Julia Gytri
At the center of every successful egg donation cycle are two people who will likely never meet. They are participating in the same process, moving toward the same goal, and yet living in completely different emotional worlds.
On one side is a young woman somewhere between 19 and 30. She sees an ad, hears about a donation experience from a friend or acquaintance, stumbles across a post online. She fills out an application. After making it through Fairfax’s highly selective application process, she moves into medical screening, completes genetic testing, and undergoes psychological evaluation. She learns more about her own biology in the eight weeks following the press of that “apply” button than most people learn in a lifetime. Maybe she’s a student, a recent graduate, or a new professional who needs time and resources to figure things out. Whoever she is, whatever she’s pursuing, she has chosen to do something extraordinary with her time, her body, and her biology. She may be motivated by curiosity, by generosity, or by the simple, decent instinct that if she can help someone become a parent, she will.
On the other side is a person (or couple) who has been waiting for a long time. Maybe they’ve been through years of failed cycles. Maybe they are living with a diagnosis that arrived early in their path to parenthood and upended every assumption they had about how things would go for them. Maybe it’s two men who have always known that building a biological family would require extraordinary help from people they may never meet. Maybe a single parent has made a choice, done the math, and arrived at the same place: this is the path. The only path.
These two people may never cross into the same reality. And yet, together, they create one of the most consequential outcomes a human can produce: a child.
This Pride Month feels like the right moment to talk honestly about the bridge between those two experiences, and crucially, about crossing it for more understanding.
For most intended parents, egg donation is not Plan A. Not even close. It is more like Plan D, E, or sometimes F. Egg donation, at its core, is a beautiful process and an enormous act of altruism on behalf of the egg donor. But for the intended parent, relinquishing traditional, romanticized notions of a child with their eyes, smile, and easily recitable family medical history is not ideal.
No. For most intended parents, donor eggs can typically enter the conversation after:
Lisa Schuman, LCSW, a leading therapist in donor conception and co-author of Building Your Family: The Complete Guide to Donor Conception, points out that infertility patients experience depression at levels comparable to people facing serious medical illness, a finding backed up by the landmark Domar study, which found women coping with infertility reported distress on par with women managing cancer or heart disease.¹ Translation: by the time someone is reading an egg donor’s profile, they have usually already lost a lot. Time. Money. Pregnancies. Privacy. The version of how they had always envisioned their family was supposed to come together.
They aren’t browsing.
They are hoping.
For other families—two dads, maybe a single parent by choice—the path looks different, but the weight is real in its own way. Many same-sex male couples have notionally understood that donor eggs would be part of any biological-child story for them. And single parents by choice have made one of the most deliberate decisions a person can make. Every intended parent’s path is deeply considered, often expensive, and almost always comes on top of the same stack of adult pressures we all face: jobs, mortgages, aging parents, marriages and breakups, and everything in between.
This is the part where, in our experience, the bridge is crossed and it’s easier to begin to make decisions: when donors and intended parents alike take a moment to step outside of their own bubble.
It’s easy (and totally human) to think about egg donations mostly in terms of yourself. It’s a BIG deal. The schedule. The compensation. The shots. The recovery. How it fits into your semester, your job, or your travel plans. None of that is wrong, and any donor who pretends those things don’t matter to her isn’t being honest. The bridge isn’t crossed when you stop thinking about yourself. It’s crossed when you realize someone else’s story is unfolding alongside yours.
Something that surprises a lot of new donors, however, is how deeply intended parents care about you. They aren’t just obsessing over your genetic panel or egg count while choosing an egg donor. Truly.
They care about your favorite book.
They want to know whether you played a sport in middle school, or if you had a part in your senior musical.
They want to see what your handwriting looks like, know if you like to draw or doodle. They care about the fact that you took time to thoughtfully answer your profile essays questions. They are getting warm fuzzies if your baby photo makes them smile.
The fact that they care about you is what makes a good donor match.
Many intended parents secretly wish that they could just meet you at the beginning of the experience. Just once, just to say thank you. Just to put a living face to the person who is making their chance at having a family possible. Even with anonymous donations, they will think about you. They’ll wonder what you ended up doing with your life. Whether you traveled. Whether you’re happy. They will genuinely wish the best for you.
That’s because you are not a set of genes in a database to them. You are a real person whose generosity may change their life. That distinction matters more than anyone in this field generally talks about. And once you really sit with it, it tends to change how the whole process feels as an egg donor.
We know that what animates egg donors is rarely what people on the outside assume. Compensation matters, sure. Of course a donor should receive proper compensation for their time and contribution (after all, it does take roughly 5 months to donate eggs, and the process itself is not necessarily a physically easy, walk-in, walk-out ordeal for everyone). But time after time, in the conversations we have with our amazing donors at Fairfax EggBank, motivations are layered and more emotionally substantive than the public narrative ever gives them credit for. Donors discuss generosity, curiosity about their own genetics, a sense of agency, and meaning. Donors are aware that they are contributing to a child they will not raise and usually feel positive about giving the intended parent on the other end their chance to become a parent. For many donors, that is precisely what makes the experience matter.
For a growing number of donors (and what makes crossing the bridge especially relevant during Pride month), what makes the decision land is realizing how many different kinds of families are on the receiving end. Some picture a woman who has tried for years to carry a pregnancy. Others picture a same-sex male couple painting a nursery, two people for whom donor eggs are the only path to a biological child. Others think about a single parent by choice who has spent years planning for this exact moment, unafraid to welcome their child on their own. For donors, the realization that their one decision could be the difference between a family existing and not existing tends to help make sense of what’s on the other side.
But we’ve found that especially for donors, when you consciously consider the experience of the intended parents as part of the process, you think of the egg donation cycle less as something you do, and more as something you are proud to be a part of.
We take being a donor at Fairfax EggBank seriously because we know what’s on the line for the families on the other end, and for you.
Our screening process is genuinely protective. Our multi-stage medical, genetic, and psychological evaluation, is conducted by licensed professionals and includes a dedicated mental health assessment. It is designed to provide intended parents with as much assurance as we can give while also ensuring you receive the information and support you deserve. We’re honest about the time commitment, the medical reality, the long-term considerations (including how at-home DNA testing has reshaped the landscape of donor disclosure), and what this experience might mean to you ten years from now. Informed consent is imperative: we never want you to feel like you signed up for something you didn’t fully understand.
And we will always remind you that there is a real family on the other side of this process. Understanding that reality is part of being an informed donor. They are someone’s daughter who has been trying for six years. Someone’s son who realized long ago that building a biological family would require the help of a donor. Someone who has saved for years for this one chance.
This Pride Month feels like a good moment to say something out loud that doesn’t get said enough: for many same-sex male couples in particular, building a family with donor eggs is the only option for many. It’s the essential ingredient that makes biological parenthood possible. The same is true for many single parents by choice and other families building through donor conception. You could be the difference between a family existing and not existing. That’s not pressure; it’s simply the extraordinary reality of what egg donation makes possible.
You don’t have to have everything figured out in order to apply. You just have to be curious enough to take the next small step. We’ll walk you through everything at your pace. Learn more about becoming an egg donor.
Julia Gytri is a multidisciplinary writer and healthcare advocate bridging the arts and public health through a hybrid career rooted in education, communications, and collaboration. Her mission is to improve the standard of care for those living with rare, stigmatized, and/or under-researched conditions through storytelling in every project she undertakes.
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