I called Ariel’s mom, Lynn, when I was serious about becoming a donor. I researched clinics in Orlando and Fort Lauderdale, and once filled out an application to donate at a facility in Tampa. But I never felt completely comfortable with the agency coordinators I spoke with on the phone. They were pushy and impersonal. I didn’t feel welcome or comfortable asking questions.Lynn, on the other hand, was delighted.“This is a wonderful thing,” she said. “Imagine it. You’re going to help someone have a baby.”Hearing her excitement over the phone washed away my insecurities. She shared the names of several doctors in the Tampa Bay area who could answer my questions. The first was a doctor with the University of South Florida.When I finally worked up the nerve to call, I was so anxious that I had to pull off the road and into a Publix parking lot. I rattled off a rambling list of questions: How would these hormones affect my health? What kind of toll would this procedure take on my body? Would I be able to conceive later on in life?One by one, Dr. Barry Verkauf answered them. He assured me that studies linking IVF treatment to cancer were inaccurate, and that the criticism of egg donation was antiquated.“The process isn’t for everyone,” he said. “You will undergo a rigorous screening process to make sure your body is healthy enough before a cycle would begin.”

The woman with the cropped blonde hair opened the door to a hip coffee shop, a place that is often seen as a hideaway for the small population of young adults in Sarasota.Rachel V. is everything parents want in a donor – she’s tall and thin with long legs, and has bright green eyes. She’s well educated, confident and bubbly, and now well-traveled, thanks in part to the five egg donations she’s done since she was 25. Over that period, she grossed $50,000 from egg donations.“I love this place, don’t you?” Rachel V. said as she studied the menu at the coffee bar. She dressed professionally, in a form-fitting skirt and delicate blouse. She looked like she belonged in a city much larger than Sarasota.Rachel works in hospitality management, a booming industry in tourism-driven Southwest Florida.“I was 25 at the time and just finishing school,” said Rachel V., now 29. “I knew I was moving to Sarasota soon and thought the money from a donation could help me do that.”As a recent graduate from the College of Charleston, she saw an advertisement on Craiglist that offered her money for eggs. Open Arms Consultants, the agency in Bradenton that I would later sign up with, posted the ad looking for donors in South Carolina.All over America, egg donor agencies and fertility clinics steer their marketing to college-age women. Couples want educated, attractive women, hoping to pass on those qualities to their donor-conceived children. Rachel V. was an ideal candidate.She was tempted by the idea of making a few thousand bucks right after graduating. Rachel V. eventually passed on Open Arms when she found a California-based agency that doubled the $5,000 first-timer fee.Her first cycle led to four more.“When I donate, I get paid $10,000 and get an all-expenses-paid 10-day trip to California,” she said. “That money has helped me move and pad my savings account. But the trip is kind of like an extra vacation for the year.”Like Rachel V., I was enrolled at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, when I first saw an advertisement for egg donation in my college newspaper. Colorful pages emphasized the lure of easy money with sparkling green dollar bills. Sometimes the look varied. Others ads showed photos of cute infants with butterflies and flowers, which told young women they could give the ultimate “gift of life” by becoming a donor.The majority of donors are under 30 simply because younger women produce healthier eggs. Statistics from one California clinic show that 40 percent of donors are actively pursuing a bachelor’s degree, while 34 percent already have a four-year degree.While education is an important part of being selected, so is a donor’s appearance. Sixty-five percent of women who donate are between 5-foot-5 to 5-9, and 77 percent weigh between 105-140 pounds. The law of supply-and-demand creates different markets for certain types of looks or ethnicities. For instance, Open Arms Consultants was willing to pay Asian women more money because they were in higher demand.Rachel V. was once flown overseas for an in-person interview with a gay couple who lived there.“They narrowed down their choice to four donors and flew us all to Spain,” she said. “They had us take a handwritten IQ test. I guess they liked me best because I was the donor they chose.”Another couple from Germany picked both Rachel and her best friend as donors for the same cycle.“My friend was someone from college who pursued donating for the first time with me. We were chosen completely at random,” she said. “This very wealthy couple was going to use a batch of eggs from me, my friend, and the mother to get pregnant. They would never know whose egg actually took.”I was fascinated by the idea of egg donation in college, but a simple Google search posed more questions than answers, and was enough to scare me away for a while. I didn’t need money that badly.Rachel V. on the other hand, never worried. She sipped her cafe con leche and casually told me how recent tests completed at the University of South Florida showed she could soon experience premature ovarian failure.“Some of my monitoring appointments were done at the University of South Florida facility, since I lived in Florida but donated in California,” Rachel V. said. “My initial tests with USF showed signs of early menopause and said I was a carrier of some kind of genetic disease that had never come up before. It of course made me second-guess donating again and really freaked me out. But when I did decide to donate again back in California, my tests showed none of those issues. It seemed like a fluke.”She’s even considering donating a sixth time.

As life went on after Ariel’s death, I stayed close with her family.For years, friends and I got together on the anniversaries of Ariel’s birth and death to plant flowers and maintain a butterfly garden for her on our old middle school campus. Afterward, Ariel’s mother, Lynn, would buy us ice cream at the nearby Dairy Queen.As we ate cones and sundaes together, sweaty and sunburned from a day at the garden, Lynn would ask us about our lives: who we were dating, what our prom dresses looked like, which colleges we were applying to — all questions she’d never be able to ask her own daughter.Lynn struggled to find normalcy after her daughter’s death. Several miscarriages led her and her husband to serious talks about egg donation and surrogacy. Eventually, Lynn conceived naturally and delivered a healthy baby boy at age 48 - a miracle in the eyes of many physicians.Her struggle to have another child made me think of others like her, couples around the world who felt the same kind of heartbreak and were forced into the same fertility battles. I saw the joy Lynn found in her son, Zach, and wondered if there was something I could do to help someone else create a family of their own.

Most donors do it for cash. Compensation can be anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 for your average donor. But a woman with model good looks or an Ivy League degree stands to make $50,000 or more for her eggs. I made $5,000.Some do it not so much for the money, but rather to help others, friends, family members, even strangers. I donated in memory of Ariel.On May 15, 2001, I packed a duffel bag full of clothes and hair accessories that I’d brought with me to school, already anxious for the last bell to ring. That night, Ariel and I were going to see the Backstreet Boys at the Tampa Bay Times Forum. It was all we could talk about for weeks.But Ariel wasn’t at school that day.I walked to class, but my teacher redirected me toward the gymnasium for an announcement. The entire student population of our small private school in New Port Richey was 200. We fit neatly into one section of bleachers.We looked out across the basketball court at the wooden stage with the stained carpet stapled to its floors, waiting for the administrators to address us. Ariel and I had spent the years prior sneaking under that stage through a misplaced panel in the girls’ locker room.We would emerge draped in dust and cobwebs, feeling as cool as the popular high school girls we saw in movies, the types that smoked cigarettes under the bleachers with boys.The assistant principal approached the lectern and asked us to quiet down.“Our school has suffered a great loss,” he began. “Ariel died last night.”A burst blood vessel in her brain killed her. Her father found her crumpled on the floor of her bedroom that morning.Students erupted into tears, the older girls wiping away mascara that left dark smears down their cheeks. Teachers passed around boxes of tissues and I collected a few in my hands, burying my face in the softness as my heart beat loudly in my ears.I saw Ariel’s mother later that day – she was wailing, her body limp in a dining room chair at a friend’s home. She was surrounded by other mothers, each one holding her up in the chair as her shrill shrieks gave way to muted whimpers over time.I couldn’t begin to understand. How was I, a 12-year-old girl who had lived the definition of a privileged life, supposed to feel about this? I was the girl who got a fat little pony for Christmas and vacationed at the mountains and the beaches with my parents multiple times a year. I had never experienced death, or heartbreak, before.My mom picked me up early that day. She’d hidden my sleepover bag in the trunk of the car and drove us to my grandmother’s house.“Ariel is with God now,” my grandmother said.All I knew was that Ariel was supposed to be here. We were supposed to be on our way to the Backstreet Boys concert, and now I was never going to see her again.

My parents and younger brother have taken great pleasure in reenacting all my greatest “near-death” experiences and illnesses at the dinner table over the years. Like the time I fell off the back of a golf cart and was convinced I’d broken my collar bone. (I didn’t.)Or the time I thought I had meningitis. (It was just a cold.)So the idea of donating eggs - injecting myself with hormones and undergoing an invasive surgery, all for someone else to have a baby — seemed a little far-fetched to my family.A couple who lived half a world away plucked me out of an online library of hundreds of women who were willing to donate their sex cells to strangers. Each of us had been broken down by our general attributes. My specifications, a fertility agency would later tell me, were desirable: 25 years old, green eyes, 5-feet, 10-inches tall, blond hair, a 3.6 university grade point average and a burgeoning new career.Those same specifications are what make my parents beam with pride.One night last summer at my parent’s dinner table, I told my mom and dad that I wanted to help somebody have a baby. The usual lively suppertime conversation and laughter died down, and my parents lost their appetites. They didn’t want to joke about that time I drove my brother’s four-wheeler into a tree anymore.I told them I am like the thousands of other women — the daughters, sisters, girlfriends or wives at someone else’s dinner table — who donate their eggs to couples who cannot conceive a child on their own.With an estimated 7.3 million people experiencing infertility in the United States, or one out of eight couples, the demand for young women like me who voluntarily undergo hormone drug treatment and egg retrieval surgery is high. And with the average compensation for this kind of donation at about $5,000 in Florida, the allure of this relatively new medical procedure is attracting more and more young women, despite the many unknowns.The eggs in my ovaries made me valuable. Without them, there is no in vitro fertilization, no surrogate mothers, no baby making business. As it unfolded, I began to feel like a commodity rather than a human being, a means to an end on the infant assembly line.As I came to learn, the $3 billion fertility industry is the Wild West of American medicine. The industry is mostly unregulated in the United States, especially in Florida. Egg donation is outlawed in Louisiana and in countries like Germany, Austria and Italy. A medical society sets unenforceable guidelines for doctors to follow in the U.S.Businesses have sprouted up, too — agencies across the country that facilitate relationships among donors, surrogate mothers, couples and doctors, cashing in on a piece of the fertility pie.Few medical studies have been done on the long-term effects of egg retrievals on healthy, 20-something donors, despite some women suffering from stroke, early menopause and cancer diagnosis. Doctors and researchers say there’s not enough information to confirm if the hormones used in in vitro fertilization treatments lead to infertility or other health issues.One of the most commonly prescribed IVF drugs, Lupron, is used off label, or not for its intended purpose. The drug was developed to treat men with prostate issues and has been used for chemical castration. Universities with medical school programs often host reproductive endocrinology departments that make enough money from IVF treatments to fund entire schools within the university. Generally, fertility doctors are among the highest-paid employees at private universities.College campuses around the country are ground zero for doctors and agencies looking to recruit donors. Agencies target young women on Facebook, Craigslist and in college newspaper advertisements, offering them cash and the idea that they’re helping start a family, but don’t explain the risks.This began as a way for me to honor a childhood friend who passed away and a hopeful account of my experience with the fertility industry. But it devolved into a tangle of broken promises, scary science and questionable experiences — ending with a ruptured cyst on my ovary and a fear that my future reproductive health may be in jeopardy.The doctors were there for my eggs and not for me. But I would never tell my parents that.I wouldn’t tell my mom and dad that I woke up to tumbleweeds of my own blond hair on my pillows, and that it would fall out in clumps for months. Or about the number of times I vomited from nausea and migraines, induced by the high levels of hormones I was pumping through my body. I wouldn’t tell them that no one knew if the effects of these hormones would haunt me later in life.It is a common, modern arrangement. Though this couple would never know me, I would help give them a child once the hormones had sufficiently ballooned my eggs for the surgical plucking and placement in another woman’s uterus. They would get what they paid for, the gift of a life, a baby that is at least half like me. But the couple would decline to get to know me, the woman whose attributes caught their attention via the distant comfort of a computer screen.Along the way, I would rely on my family to support me through a procedure they never really agreed with in the first place.“My first grandchild is going to live halfway around the world from me,” my mother said.I may be paranoid about a runny nose, but this was different. It wouldn’t be something we’d ever joke about at the dinner table.

x WHAT IS ASRM?

IVF medicine has grown to be a $3 billion industry that is self-regulated by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine and Society for Reproductive Technology in the United States. The groups set guidelines for practices and accept membership fees, but are limited in how they can enforce the rules.



For example, the ASRM says a donor should not donate more than six times in her lifetime. Different doctors set rules in their own clinics too, but many donors have gone on to donate 10 or 12 times at varying clinics.



“We cannot control the individual choices a donor makes,” said Paula Amato, the ethics committee chair for ASRM. “We see no need for more regulation at this time, nor would we need it as the industry continues to grow. We are capable of monitoring it ourselves.”



The ASRM also says that compensation for egg donors should not exceed $10,000 per cycle. Compensation should not be the driving motivator to get girls to donate, Amato said. However, plenty of donors made $50,000 or more on a particular cycle because of their model good looks or Ivy League educations.



A group of donors filed a class action lawsuit against the ASRM in 2011 for price fixing compensation. ASRM stood by its limit placed on compensation, which was put in place to keep fertility costs low and women from discounting the risks associated with donation. Litigation is still pending.



I was paid $5,000 for my first cycle with Open Arms Consultants, which is about average in Florida. The agency paid for my birth control prescriptions and my gas mileage for trips back and forth to Tampa. IVF medicine has grown to be a $3 billion industry that is self-regulated by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine and Society for Reproductive Technology in the United States. The groups set guidelines for practices and accept membership fees, but are limited in how they can enforce the rules.For example, the ASRM says a donor should not donate more than six times in her lifetime. Different doctors set rules in their own clinics too, but many donors have gone on to donate 10 or 12 times at varying clinics.“We cannot control the individual choices a donor makes,” said Paula Amato, the ethics committee chair for ASRM. “We see no need for more regulation at this time, nor would we need it as the industry continues to grow. We are capable of monitoring it ourselves.”The ASRM also says that compensation for egg donors should not exceed $10,000 per cycle. Compensation should not be the driving motivator to get girls to donate, Amato said. However, plenty of donors made $50,000 or more on a particular cycle because of their model good looks or Ivy League educations.A group of donors filed a class action lawsuit against the ASRM in 2011 for price fixing compensation. ASRM stood by its limit placed on compensation, which was put in place to keep fertility costs low and women from discounting the risks associated with donation. Litigation is still pending.I was paid $5,000 for my first cycle with Open Arms Consultants, which is about average in Florida. The agency paid for my birth control prescriptions and my gas mileage for trips back and forth to Tampa.

x While the risks of donating eggs have decreased since the industry’s inception, the procedure can still lead to serious side effects. Among the most serious complications is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which is the painful swelling of the ovaries.



Less than 1 percent of USF patients experience this. While the risks of donating eggs have decreased since the industry’s inception, the procedure can still lead to serious side effects. Among the most serious complications is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which is the painful swelling of the ovaries.Less than 1 percent of USF patients experience this.

Raquel Cool says there’s a lot about egg donation women don’t know but many choose to do it anyway. Photo by Dustin Hammon

Dr. Verkauf told me I shouldn’t let the “what-ifs” scare me away.Although relieved, I wasn’t completely convinced.As a reporter, I am trained to leave no rock unturned when looking for answers. I scoured the Internet trying to learn as much as I could about the process, but I was constantly coming up empty. I would come to find out that it wasn’t because I wasn’t doing my job. There are just more questions than answers out there.I could not find a single medical study about the long-term risks of egg donation. So I went to the source.“There’s not a lot out there specifically in the donor population,” said Paula Amato, a fertility specialist from Portland and the chair of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine ethics committee. ASRM is the governing agency that sets guidelines for clinics and doctors.Amato could not locate a study on the health risks of egg donors.“There is no reason to expect that their outcomes would be any different than IVF patients going through the same thing except they wouldn’t be getting pregnant of course, which if anything, would decrease their risk of any complications,” she said.It’s not easy to find the stories about women who are infertile or have suffered from cancer, stroke and ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, one of the most common, and painful, side effects of egg donation.“Doctors don’t tell donors what the risks are because they don’t know,” said Judy Norsigian, executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves, a women’s health advocacy group that has spoken out about the dangers of egg donation. “These women aren’t treated like patients. They’re treated like a commodity. They are being bought by parents who want a child.”Instead, Internet searches promote the websites of egg agency and fertility clinics — the very businesses that want to recruit donors. These sites provide few facts or ideas of what to expect, but instead focus on how much money a woman can make and what’s required to get started.They highlight heartwarming tales about the gift of life and how families were created through the generosity of a stranger. While many of these stories are real and are the very reason I wanted to do this, I knew better than to think everything about egg donation was rosy all the time.“There’s a lot that we just don’t know about egg donation, but there are still so many women who choose to donate anyway,” said Raquel Cool, an egg donor and founding member of We Are Egg Donors, a group of women that advocate for health initiatives for donors. Cool, along with two others, launched the site in 2013. “Google searches don’t provide the information donors need to consider before deciding whether or not donating is right for them.”Cool donated her eggs once while living in California. After experiencing ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, she decided against a second donation.“I felt like I was alone during the entire process and I had little control over what was happening to me,” Cool said. “I had nowhere to turn. There was no community or support from my clinic or online. As we started talking to more former and current egg donors, we began to see a common theme - there was little support out there for donors.”

§

Justine Griffin awaits an examination at Dr. Kyle Garner’s office in Sarasota. Garner treated and consulted with Griffin as her primary gynecologist during the egg donation process.

My parents didn’t believe me.The idea that I - the prissy, wimpy princess of our family - might prick myself with needles for two weeks straight and undergo invasive surgery, all for someone else’s benefit, was too much.But I was doing it. I had signed the contract.My father ignored the subject outright, making for tense and awkward family gatherings.My mother, by comparison, was the toughest to convince.We went back and forth about it. The conversations veered from bickering to pleading and back to bickering again. She peppered me with questions. Often she would plead for me to reconsider, or she’d ask me to rattle off the few medical facts known about the procedure, then stop me mid-sentence.“You know what?” she said. “Don’t answer my questions; I just don’t want to know.”Asking her to be the mother of an egg donor was taking our occasional bickering over my life choices to a new level. Technically, she’d be the genetic grandmother of a child she’d never get to meet. I understood that my decision to donate eggs weighed on her, and the rest of my family.“I’m never going to know my first grandchild,” she’d say.Sometimes she asked me not to tell anyone about it. My mother and I occasionally butted heads over politics and lifestyles - gay marriage and abortion were always hot topics - but I had never done anything that she seemed truly ashamed about.It was as if her “radically liberal” daughter’s life choices would somehow taint the way the people in her social circles saw our family.My accomplishments were always something my parents bragged about. From my good grades in school to my career, they were always proud of me. But egg donation was something my mother couldn’t beam about around her friends, most of whom had children my age. This was crossing the line.At one point, she offered me $10,000 to walk away from it all.“If you need money that bad this isn’t the way to do it,” she said.She sought an ally in my boyfriend, David.“Do you think she’s crazy?” she asked, looking to recruit someone else to her cause.David was wise not to answer her. He was supportive, even if he didn’t truly know what he was getting himself into. By donating my eggs, I was signing myself up for an alcohol and sex sabbatical. The moment I started injecting hormones would be the moment our intimate relationship would be put on hold. I couldn’t drink, nor could I ride horses -my favorite hobby and most important way to relieve stress -for fear of jostling over-juiced eggs.So what if I’m a bit prissy and a fan of being pampered? I wanted to do this for myself as much as I wanted to do it for a couple out there in the world.I had something to prove.It took about a month for my profile with Open Arms Consultants to go live.This meant parents all over the world could view current photos and information about me online while shopping for a donor. The application took more than an hour to complete and gave parents a checklist of just about every important detail in my life.The application called for my school history, including my SAT exam scores and my grade point average from college. They needed to know my exact weight and height. The thickness of my hair. My personality. My favorite subjects in school. My future goals. My family’s medical history.These people needed to know the condition of my eyes and teeth and how much I drink each week. They required my driver’s license and my Social Security number to prove I wasn’t a criminal.I joined a baby-seeking social network, where parents can flip through the pages of more than 300 donors from across the country. They read personal details about our bodies, our lives, our families, and scrutinize the pictures we provide. These parents are crafting their perfect Barbie doll baby - picking out what physical features, strengths, likes and dislikes they want in their own little human.It was a strange feeling, to be picked apart like that via messages on a computer screen. I would never know these people, their names, their faces or where they came from, but they would know so much about me.A few months later I was matched.A woman named Julie Pryor emailed in June to congratulate me on being selected by a couple. Pryor is a senior coordinator with Open Arms Consultants. Her job is to facilitate relationships between intended parents and egg donors, scheduling appointments and monitoring all the steps -from signing contracts to delivering the baby.Her initial message was direct: She needed to know what form of birth control I was on and when my next menstrual cycle would begin.Suddenly, this was real.

§

x Doctors stand to make millions on women who want to start a family. The average IVF cycle costs $18,000 to $20,000, not including a donor or surrogate’s compensation.



At the University of South Florida, reproductive endocrinologists’ salaries range from $150,000 to $200,000 a year. Most operate private practices outside the school’s IVF program.



At Cornell, Dr. Zev Rosenwaks at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility earned well over $3 million, The New York Times reported in 2009. Dr. James A. Grifo, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, was paid more than $2 million by New York University. Both doctors substantially out-earned the presidents of their respective schools. Doctors stand to make millions on women who want to start a family. The average IVF cycle costs $18,000 to $20,000, not including a donor or surrogate’s compensation.At the University of South Florida, reproductive endocrinologists’ salaries range from $150,000 to $200,000 a year. Most operate private practices outside the school’s IVF program.At Cornell, Dr. Zev Rosenwaks at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility earned well over $3 million, The New York Times reported in 2009. Dr. James A. Grifo, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, was paid more than $2 million by New York University. Both doctors substantially out-earned the presidents of their respective schools.

x New York and California lead the way in the number of IVF cycles per year. Florida’s friendly laws place it among the top states where fertility medicine is growing.



A vague statute in Florida allows for the donation of “pre-embryos,” like eggs and sperm, as long as the parties involved have completed a pre-planned adoption agreement.



“Florida has forged the way for many states in the legality of egg donation,” said Dr. Craig Sweet, a reproductive endocrinologist in Fort Myers. “We’ve set the standards in some ways.” New York and California lead the way in the number of IVF cycles per year. Florida’s friendly laws place it among the top states where fertility medicine is growing.A vague statute in Florida allows for the donation of “pre-embryos,” like eggs and sperm, as long as the parties involved have completed a pre-planned adoption agreement.“Florida has forged the way for many states in the legality of egg donation,” said Dr. Craig Sweet, a reproductive endocrinologist in Fort Myers. “We’ve set the standards in some ways.”

x Some European countries outlaw it completely, like Germany, Austria and Italy. Australia permits egg donation, but the donors are not allowed to be compensated. England allowed donors to be compensated for the first time in 2012. Some European countries outlaw it completely, like Germany, Austria and Italy. Australia permits egg donation, but the donors are not allowed to be compensated. England allowed donors to be compensated for the first time in 2012.

I met Pryor at the Open Arms Consultants office about a week after our initial email correspondence.The office is in a two-story building with a handful of other small businesses, tucked into a residential area not far from the interstate off State Road 70. In the parking lot were Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs and other fancy European models - egg donation is a lucrative business, after all.While not all couples who turn to IVF, egg donation or surrogacy are wealthy, the cost to build your own baby is not cheap. The couple to whom I donated had spent upwards of $150,000 for everything from their own fertility treatments to the medical care of a surrogate.Most insurance companies don’t cover this kind of elective medicine.The office door to Open Arms is locked all the time. To enter, one must be buzzed in by the receptionist who watches from a camera screen beside her desk. While IVF may be slowly making its way into the mainstream with actresses in their 50s having babies and extreme cases like Octomom, a stigma surrounding the process makes some groups uncomfortable.The president of the company, Souad Dreyfus, a tall and athletic woman of Moroccan descent, was the first to say hello.She wore a fitted dress and carried herself with flowing, confident strides. She seemed like a woman who would be hard not to like.She hugged me and welcomed me into the office. This would be the last time I would interact with Dreyfus one-on-one until she handed over my $5,000 check after the egg retrieval several months later.Julie Pryor would become my egg donor lifeline. She was the person I would call in case of an emergency and the one who scheduled my appointments. She was the gateway to the parents who wanted my eggs and would control all communication between us.I sat on a plush couch and looked at photos of families with smiling, drooling babies. An entire wall in another room was devoted to photos of babies and families, all of whom used Open Arms egg donation or surrogacy services.As soon as I sat down in Julie’s office the questions spewed from my mouth.Would I be able to meet the people who picked me?What were they like?How did they choose me?I came here knowing that I shouldn’t expect objective answers from the agency. This place was a business and I was nothing more than a vehicle for one of their services. But there was some-thing gentle and maternal about the way Pryor smiled at me and patiently answered my questions.Pryor, a mother of two, could tell I was nervous. She clearly had seen this routine before.She began by telling me as much about the parents as she could without giving away their identity. They were from Ireland, where fertility treatments are difficult to do. The intended mother underwent a number of failed IVF cycles before choosing an egg donor and a surrogate as her last attempt to have a baby.The surrogate also lives in the Bradenton area. Once my eggs were removed and fertilized in a laboratory with the father’s sperm, the surrogate would carry the child or children to birth.In Florida, a mother has 48 hours to decide if she wants to keep her child, no matter the contracts signed or circumstance. By using my egg and another woman to carry the child, the surrogate would have no genetic claim on the baby after it is born.My heart ached for this faceless couple. I wanted to help them.I hoped to have some kind of personal connection to the couple. But Pryor told me that they wished for our arrangement to remain anonymous, which meant they would not know my name or anything more about me than what they read in my profile and in my medical records. Pryor told me that most donation cycles were this way.The word “anonymous” gave me pause. It was important to know these people in some way, even the surrogate, as we embarked on this journey. Pryor took my concerns into account and said she would ask the others involved if they would consider doing an arrangement where we’d know one another. She sounded hopeful.All I had to do now was sign on the dotted line.

§

Reporter Justine Griffin and her boyfriend, David McSwane, enjoy a drink at Growler’s Pub in Sarasota just a few weeks before the egg donation process.

After that meeting, I was on a high.I felt confident about becoming a donor and finally doing something I had thought about for several years. The first step was to sync my menstrual cycle with the surrogate. That way, when the day came to extract my eggs, she would be ready to accept the embryo.Because this family required both an egg donor and surrogate, the process was time sensitive. Once the eggs were removed from me, they would be fertilized in a lab and placed into the surrogate just a few days later.Even though I had already signed a tentative contract, I had to complete several tests to make sure I was healthy and capable of becoming a donor. The first was a psychological exam.I was excited to get started. But my boyfriend, David, wasn’t as thrilled.My cell phone buzzed the night before my first evaluation.I was tucked under a blanket on my couch, reading a book and trying to keep my mind off what was to come the next day. I was thankful to see David’s name light up on the phone and answered it eagerly, knowing that just the sound of his voice would likely be enough to make me feel less anxious.It didn’t. He was worried, too.“I think we need to take more time to talk about this,” David said.I was already nervous about how he felt, but he never led me to believe that he thought this was a mistake. David was nothing but supportive about my interest in donating eggs. He was the one who convinced me I should write about my experience.So the concern in his voice shook me.David was worried about how this could affect our future. At the end of all of this, whether it went without issue or was riddled with stress and ongoing problems, he wanted to know what it would mean for us.“What if one day we want to have kids?” he asked.So much was up in the air. So many things could go wrong.It made sense that David bottled up his emotions those first few weeks. He was discovering the risks involved at a much slower pace than I did. By signing that stack of paperwork in the donation agency office, this whole thing became very real. And it not only affected my life anymore. It affected his life and our future.The next morning I called to reschedule my appointment, lying to the therapist about having something come up at work. We pushed the appointment into the next week.That gave David and me all weekend to talk about what would happen next.We talked about it over the next few days and decided I should move forward. He was apprehensive, but supportive.

§

Dr. Craig Sweet, a reproductive endocrinologist, opens up a canister, where he stores frozen eggs, sperm and embryos, in his Fort Myers office.

I had never seen a therapist before and I worried about what kind of questions I would be asked. Would my incessant habit of chewing my fingernails be a sign of a much deeper problem? What should I wear? Would something too casual mark me as unfit for donation? Would something too professional make me seem pretentious?Somehow I had to prove that I was mentally stable enough to give my eggs away to strangers.I made a mental note not to bite my nails and decided on a simple, black-and-white sundress with a black sweater and a modest pair of heels.The moment I stepped into the therapist’s office on Davis Island in downtown Tampa, I was unprepared for the types of questions I would have to answer.Kathy Fountain, a former broadcast journalist who found a second career as a reproductive therapist, sat with a pen and notebook in hand and ticked off the easy questions first — my sexual partners, whether I ever had an abnormal pap smear, how often I drank.Fountain told me that I was an ideal donor before moving on to the more startling questions.She asked me how I would feel if the surrogate mother was having twins but had to abort one because both were at risk during the pregnancy. She wanted to know how I would feel if the parents chose to give away my unused eggs to another couple, or donate them to an embryo donation clinic — a center similar to a sperm bank where parents don’t have to jump through the same kind of hoops to match up with a donor or surrogate.I stared out the large window in Fountain’s one-room office. The hulking frame of Tampa General Hospital, where I would soon have my retrieval surgery, loomed in view.I told Fountain my eggs were merely a tool to create a child and I felt no ownership over the baby. This child belonged to the parents in Ireland, not me. The decision to abort one of the babies for the health of another was a choice between the surrogate and the prospective parents - it had nothing to do with me.The idea of my eggs being given away to someone else was something I’d never considered before. I didn’t know a couple had the right to do this.A doctor could easily extract 30 healthy eggs from me, but only a few would be fertilized and fewer would be used to create a baby. If the process didn’t work the first time, the couple would have extras to try again. But what happens to the rest?“Egg banks and embryo donation centers are a way for families to ethically remove the frozen embryos they know they won’t use,” said Dr. Sweet, the physician who runs one of the country’s largest embryo donation centers in Fort Myers.Couples can choose to purchase frozen embryos with some limited information about the egg and sperm donors at half the cost of paying for an egg donor and embryo transplant, Sweet said.His center hosts around 150 frozen embryos at any given time.He also recruits egg donors and stores frozen embryos and eggs for patients. Some have been sitting in his facility for years while his staff struggle to hunt down couples who either stopped paying for the freezing services or have moved away. The law about the disposal of embryos is vague and to avoid legal issues, Sweet continues to store them anyway.“Florida is a safe haven for a third party business like mine,” he said. “Some states have mirrored Florida statutes, while other states and some countries forbid it all together. It is still an ethical way to have a child.”I never thought of what could happen to those extra eggs. I never realized that my eggs could go to couples all over the world and that there could be a half-dozen or more children born to differ-ent families with my genetic makeup.One day they could try to find me, too.The therapist ended the conversation on that note. What if, decades from now, a young person with my eyes or nose or hair shows up on my doorstep asking questions about where they came from? Although the contracts I signed listed my name as GJ021288, someone could conceivably find me years from now, using ever-advancing technologies.I’ve pictured this very scenario before. A stranger comes knocking at my door and, oddly enough, they look a little like me. I told Fountain I would welcome them in.It’s an industry hazard that sperm donors have already dealt with. But it boils down to basic human nature - as technology and science evolve, we, as humans, will always be curious about where we came from.Knowing that there is another person in the world related to me is something I will think about for the rest of my life. To be able to meet that person one day would be the epilogue of this journey.Before our session was over, I took a written personality test. There were more than 300 questions that posed odd social scenarios such as whether “I prefer to spend to spend time with my friends rather than be alone” or “I often think of myself as the leader in a social group.” I bubbled in “absolutely true” for both of those questions.Other questions were darker. Like the ones that read “Sometimes I feel like everyone is out to get me.” Or, “Sometimes I think nobody cares about me at all.” Not at all true, I bubbled.I read each question carefully, fearful that if I got one wrong, I would make myself seem like a self-loathing loner who drinks too much wine on the weekdays.

§

Nearly three months passed before my cycle began. I continued to take Reclipsen, a 28-day birth control pill that had significantly higher estrogen doses than the pill I was used to taking.While I had been on birth control for years, I noticed my body was beginning to change.First came the migraines. They would strike at random, sometimes in the morning when I was driving to work, or after several hours of staring at a computer screen in my cubicle. This wasn’t the first time I had a migraine, but the frequency was alarming.I did my best to figure out what was causing these excruciating headaches, which crippled me, barring me from doing anything productive until they passed.Then my hair started falling out. I filled garbage bags full of blond strands that clogged my shower drain, overstuffed the bristles of my brushes and easily filled fistfuls when I gently twirled a few locks around my finger.I changed my diet, cutting out coffee and drinking more water. I started taking vitamins. The only thing that changed was my birth control.Internet searches led to scary results, but many women of varying ages complained of migraines and weight gain with this specific kind of birth control.“During one cycle, I felt pregnant,” said Sarah Dahn, a 25-year-old egg donor from Orlando. Dahn has donated her eggs four times, the first when she was 21. “I would get morning sickness and smells really bothered me. During another cycle I was just tired all the time. But for the most part, my body responded well to all the donations.”Dahn donated more than 20 eggs during each cycle, but her body felt different each time. There is no exact science to the dosage of fertility medicine, doctors say, as every woman responds differently to treatment.“My last donation - the fourth - was not so smooth. The doctors told me everything was flawless, but when it was time to go home after the retrieval I was bleeding all over the place. That had never happened before,” Dahn said. She donated 44 eggs. “The doctors said it was because I had donated so many eggs. Each time they went in to retrieve another egg meant they had to puncture my ovary again and again. I’ve never felt so sore.”The experience shook her enough to consider not donating again.“All of it was very alarming, to the point that I felt like I shouldn’t donate again if there is a possibility I would respond like this,” she said. “That was just this past August. Now that it’s over it's possible I would donate one more time when I’m done with school. The trauma has faded. I don’t know how my husband would feel about it though.”The day I was to start my own hormone injections crept closer and closer. I was terrified.