That One Time I Almost Donated My Eggs

And other desperation fueled misadventures

Once when I was in nursing school, I considered getting an IUD placed. I didn’t have insurance at the time and there was a Planned Parenthood location right across from campus, so I made an appointment to see the Women’s Health NP. A few weeks later I walked through the protesters and metal detectors and downstairs to the area where well woman exams were done. I sat down in the waiting room and settled in for my wait.

Do you know what I saw when I looked up at the TV mounted on the ceiling? My own face. My own 19 year old face, with the dirty fish tank that was home to two turtles in my ex boyfriend’s duplex living room was on the screen at Planned Parenthood while I sat there considering whether or not I wanted to have an intentionally irritating piece of copper shoved into my uterus. I swear the girl sitting next to me noticed and snuck an extra long look to make sure it was me up there, but that may just be me spiraling.

On the screen I was singing the praises of condoms and why they were my “birth control method of choice” (which was a lie by the way) for Bedsider, a project of Power to Decide, a non-profit that states it’s mission is to “advance sexual and reproductive well-being for all” and is funded by Bayer Corporation, Merck & Co., Plan B One Step, and Google among others. They also run Abortionfinder.org. I watched myself awkwardly discussing the ease of use of a birth control method I had rarely ever used in my life on the screen and realized I had forgotten I had filmed this PSA. I had forgotten because I had forgotten many of the things I had done in that period of my life, likely as a coping mechanism.

The video was the result of me scanning the Craigslist “Gigs” section looking for ways to make money that were not questionable “modeling” photo shoots or selling used underwear. I needed money, despite the fact that I was working multiple jobs at the time, to support both my own and the before-mentioned ex-boyfriend’s heroin and OxyContin habits. I was a semi-functional opiate addict in an abusive relationship trying to hold onto the shred of integrity and self respect I still had by avoiding what my boyfriend wanted me to start doing-stripping across the river in East St. Louis.

Now, while filming a video about how condoms are a viable birth control method isn’t the worst thing I could have been doing for drug money, it is also extremely out of character. I generally do not believe in the use of hormonal birth control as it is so potentially physically and emotionally harmful for women. Knowing my face is out there representing a project that is literally funded by the companies that produce these drugs and don’t bat an eye when young women get horrible blood clots and die from their products truly makes me feel some shame. I share this as a sort of “light” example of the fact that when you are facing the sort of desperation that goes hand in hand with addiction, particularly to street drugs-you are so vulnerable to decision making that is completely out of alignment with your spirit. When you make decisions and move through life in this way, abandoning yourself consistently, this cycle spirals and gives way, often many times over.

This cycle peaked when I drove to an appointment to begin the process of egg donation around this same time in my life, and never walked through the door. I didn’t walk through the door because I didn’t want to lie about my drug addiction and pass some sort of hellacious problem onto someone else. I didn’t walk through that door because I innately didn’t like the idea of my child walking through life never knowing anything of me. I didn’t walk through that door because I didn’t know what kind of people would be purchasing my precious eggs. Would they sing to this baby? Would they take her to story time at the library? To cut down their own Christmas tree? Or would they leave her to cry in her crib so they could have a better schedule? Leave her with a nanny all day? Would they be those people that make toddlers do state capitol flash cards? Or much, much worse….

Those are certainly reasons enough to not have walked through the door. Now though, another, most glaring and ugly, reason comes through to me. Walking through that fertility clinic door would have made me at best just another pawn in the game of people much more well off than myself, and at worst, the same but with lifelong health and fertility consequences to battle. In an alternative world the only babies I would have would be the ones sold off to wealthier people than I. A story that many women have walked in reality.

Now we pivot for a moment. I was recently listening to

Bridget Phetasy

interview

Rob Henderson

about his often referenced and very accurate concept of “luxury beliefs” on her podcast recently. For context- Rob defines luxury beliefs as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”. They were discussing the argument about whether or not trans-identified males should be allowed to self-ID their way into female prisons-this idea of course being a prime example of a luxury belief.

It’s an idea that some elites espouse and are helping change policy on, and in doing so are gaining some measure of liberal brownie points-yet if you were to ask one of those elites if they would be comfortable with their wife or daughter having a man as her cell mate-well you can guess for yourself what their true feelings on the matter would be.

In the interview, Bridget mentions that the people who think males in female prisons is A-okay think this way because they cannot imagine themselves being in jail, and that people like her CAN, due to her addict past. I too, can most certainly imagine myself in prison because I narrowly escaped that fate many a time in those years between high school graduation and becoming pregnant with my first child and gaining sobriety. So much so, that every time I get pulled over for a minor thing I sweat through my clothes and can feel my heartbeat in my face the entire time-all of this despite years and years of distance from the experiences that are causing the reaction.

People who have led lives on the fringes, who have experienced true economic desperation, who have known the self-abandonment-shame-cycle intimately-we can look around and assess many of the current hot topic social issues and trends and see them for what they are. “What they are” being distracting pain points in society that demand various sacrifices of the lower class as tribute to the cause while simultaneously bolstering the status of those with more power and money.

I now see why I look at surrogacy and egg donation through such a critical lens- that is, why I see them not just as the objectively messy ethical situations they are, but I see them through the eyes of the women being used. I can imagine choosing to be a surrogate or choosing to donate eggs in the same way Bridget can imagine herself going to jail. It’s not just a hypothetical. It’s a vivid and visceral sort of deja vu to an alternative life we were lucky enough to sidestep. The very concept of the surrogacy and egg donation industries being a positive service for society is a luxury belief. The child-craving wealthy selling the industry as one of selflessness and ultimate good requires- in order to both manufacture their progeny and to profit off of the backs (and uteruses) of the donors/surrogates-a whole lot of emotional, physical and spiritual sacrifice of lower class women.

The combination of IV drug addiction, a codependent and abusive relationship with a man who didn’t care how I made the money as long as I gave him some, youthful gullibility and true financial desperation led me again to Craigslist gigs (what a digital hellscape of the human psyche that was by the way) to reach out to a couple of fertility clinics. I somehow was able to convince myself that the idea of commodifying my reproductive capacity through egg donation was preferable to commodifying my sexual desirability by giving lapdances on the East side, so when I got quick replies with application details and requests for photos, I didn’t actually apply any sort of intelligent or realistic assessment of the coercive nature of the venture I was taking on.

I told myself I would get clean temporarily so that I could pass drug tests and not have to feel the guilt of knowing I potentially contributed to some sort of tainting of my gametes. I ignored the weird feelings I had when they requested not only current photos of myself but photos of me as a baby and child, and even of my sister and parents. I speed-read through the document on how the process works and didn’t look into the side effects. I was desperate. The coercion of this process is so inherent that it becomes both an inner and outer phenomenon. I was coercing myself into making this all okay in my mind while the clinics were coercing me into an emotionally and physically harmful situation for their own financial gain.

I filled out the papers. I told them my eye color and my GPA and my dreams of being a nurse for the future. I told them that I’m right handed and have wavy auburn hair and was artistic and liked to read a lot as a child. I sent them photos of myself in my swim suit with my fat toddler belly sticking out as a 2 year old, at 5th grade graduation smiling with pride, at prom with the hair I did myself because I found it a waste of money to get it done professionally.

I managed to leave out the photos of me drunkenly doing jumping jacks in the front yard at 3 AM with bruises all over my legs or wearing lingerie at punk rock concerts where I got kicked out for underage drinking. I didn’t tell them that despite my high test scores I had dropped out of college. When they asked me what my “philosophy on life” was, I didn’t tell them that I was just busy trying to put one foot in front of the other and not stumble all the way to rock bottom.

I remember thinking the questions seemed overly prying. I remember cringing thinking of couples reading my answers and choosing my eggs based on how I described myself as a child and my favorite subject in school. The creeping sensation of “this is off and you should run” was settled there in the back of my mind but I moved through the motions.

My anecdotal tale comes to an anti-climatic ending, as once I was chosen and asked to come in for an appointment, I just didn’t go in. I ghosted the fertility pimps after that and never really thought about it until a few years later when I gave birth for the first time and was sucker punched with the heavy reality of what exactly I had almost been willing to just let loose into the world for some dollar bills. A baby, my baby, like the one I had just birthed, out there just existing without me? Having my own child made me understand the desperation of the buyers but also made me frightfully angry toward them. How dare you offer mere money in trade for a soul that I am bound to? In exchange for my most precious bodily treasures? It’s too much to ask.

When I searched “egg donation” in my old emails to remind myself of exactly what timeline these decisions were being made on, I came across the name of one of the women I was corresponding with and went ahead and googled the name. I didn’t expect to find anything. Instead, I found a host of articles, including one from the FBI’s website, discussing her arrest and indictment on multiple charges of fraud related to non-payment to the women whose eggs she facilitated the harvest of. Had I gone ahead with my plans, I likely would not have been compensated for my trouble.

I cannot help but see this situation as the perfect illustration of the overarching theme here-desperate women doing desperate things. Only this woman was willing to use other women as her sacrificial cash cow. It isn’t just the money that is problematic though.

Surrogacy and egg donation are often framed as a wonderful gift, the sort of thing angels on Earth do, the most wonderful thing a woman could do for another woman. This is a luxury belief-because it ignores that it is all too much to ask. It ignores the rights and well being of the child created and turns women into part and parcel. When a woman chooses to sell her reproductive capacity because she just wants to make a little extra cash, or because she just “loves being pregnant” or because she has so much compassion for the childless couple-she is legitimizing an act that can be weaponized against her fellow woman who is vulnerable and desperate.

This attitude completely ignores the coercive nature of the beast here. Is directly helping one other woman worth indirectly harming many, many others? Commodifying our own reproductive capacity as women requires us to part ourselves out, to separate the human soul that is our own and the potentiality of soulfulness that lives in our wombs. It’s the sort of thing that can only thrive in venomous environments. In a society that truly values women and babies rather than one that assigns mere monetary valuableness to them, there would be no surrogacy or egg donation.

Economic desperation breeds moral corruption at worst, and apathetic disinterest at best, and neither of these sentiments belong in the realm of female sexual and reproductive experience.