In Spain, more cycles of assisted reproduction are carried out per inhabitant than in any other country in Europe and around four out of every ten of these cycles already involve egg donation, that is, implanting into the surrogate mother an embryo generated with eggs from other woman. The percentage will grow in the coming years, because women are increasingly trying to become mothers at a later age. And that, the relative normalization of the process, means that it is no longer taboo.
You just have to type “egg donation” in the Tik Tok or Instagram search engine (or “donor”, ??or “implantation” or any of the very active hashtags around assisted reproduction) to find thousands of first-person stories from all over the world. the angles: women who take hormones to be able to donate, couples in ‘beta-waiting’ (the two weeks that pass from the completion of a treatment until a reliable pregnancy test can be done), curious people who ask about genetic grief (it’s called thus the process that is followed to assume that there will be no genetic link with the child), stories that end in triumphant ultrasounds, stories – many – that end badly, or that do not end as expected.
Women with fertility problems, much more than men, have always found refuge online, the difference is that they were conversations in very localized forums, which had their own codes and terminology, and now they are content open to anyone, which In some way they are changing the way these issues are talked about, which is no longer so mediated by the official narrative of the fertility industry itself.
“No one would go through all of this completely free, because yes, it involves shit,” says, for example, a Tik Toker who has donated twice in a video titled ‘Donate eggs in A Coruña’. “I donated eggs about ten years ago. He had a precarious situation, he earned money and needed money. A friend of mine had done it and I didn’t feel very comfortable. At that moment I was only thinking about the thousand euros,” Estrella de la Libertad Macías also explains to La Vanguardia, who has spoken about his past experience as a donor on Tik Tok.
That is one of the main differences between the promotional materials of fertility clinics, which until recently also recorded and posted videos on YouTube and networks with some of their donors explaining their experience, until the data protection law prohibited it. In these messages, and in all communication from the clinics, the altruistic nature of egg donation is always emphasized. In fact, the law also prevents them from publishing what is charged for going through the hormone and donation process, and that amount, between 800 and 1,100 euros, is not exactly considered a payment but rather compensation for the inconvenience, which is quite a bit. .
Researchers such as Sara Lafuente, sociologist and author of the book Reproductive Markets (Katakrak) and Anna Molas, an anthropologist at the UAB who has been studying social attitudes towards assisted reproduction for years, agree that the economic compensation offered in Spain, a An amount close to the interprofessional minimum wage (in Portugal it is around 600 euros, and in the United Kingdom, 700), it is a fundamental factor for donors and one of the several differentiating facts that have made the powerful fertility clinic sector grow.
“The motivation is economic in the vast majority of donors,” says Molas, who has interviewed hundreds of them in her various research processes. In one of her studies, she even recorded speech differences between those who had donated eggs longer ago and those who had done so more recently.
“People who were in the process or had recently done it had a narrative closer to that of the clinics. They talked about a generous act and the economic motivation arose later and then they did not speak in altruistic terms again in the two hours that the interview lasted. It existed in them as an integration of the official discourse. On the other hand, people who had donated some time ago had a different story and asked questions that had not been asked then. They wondered to what extent they had enough information,” explains Anna Molas.
Lafuente, who also interviewed about 75 donors as part of the EDNA project, which was carried out in the United Kingdom, Belgium and Spain, prefers not to talk about “motivations” because it implies “putting the focus on the donors and their morality. In reality, as with other issues in life, we do not think in these terms.”
The project asked, among other things, what they were going to use the money for and what the relevance was: “Everyone was clear about what they were going to use it for and that without the financial compensation they would not have donated or would not have repeated. Some donors who at the time approached the clinic without knowing that there would be a financial exchange, when they saw how hard the process was and how long it took, they thought about it. It is key for these donations to exist. Without compensation the system would not work.”
Lafuente also adds a gender reflection: “There is a whole system and a way of understanding how women should relate to money. Having an altruistic will is much better seen than an economic motivation, there is a field of social desirability that plays a role there. In egg donation, economic pressure intersects with gender pressure, the need to adopt the discourse of altruism, and it does not mean that many of the donors are not emotionally linked to the process, they want to help other women.
In fact, in these new terms in which the conversation about infertility and egg donation begins to take place, even many pregnant recipients are aware of this situation. Rebeca Badía, a Valencian actress and presenter who is recounting her journey towards motherhood on Instagram (@yosoyovomama) and on YouTube (Ovo Mamá), recognizes that when she was in her early twenties – she is now 42 – she considered donating eggs. . “But when I saw that you had to have injections and hormones, I thought it wasn’t that much money either.” It seems to her that the term “donor” is incorrect. “They haven’t donated to me, I’m paying something. And if I donate the excess embryo I have, someone else will end up paying for it. “I’m not saying I bought my baby, but another term should be used.”
Badía, who is 29 weeks pregnant, also often talks on her channels about her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and her decision to be a single mother and receives many messages from other women in similar situations, also from some who have opted for egg donation, perhaps after some failed assisted reproduction cycles with the oocytes themselves: “My mother, who is from another generation, sometimes tells me: maybe you don’t need to tell it so much.” But her decision is to bring the issue with maximum transparency. She has even prepared a story to tell her daughter how she came into the world, written by Noemí Catalán, a popularizer who has more than 30,000 followers on an Instagram account (@cestalvienoemi_mamipordonacion) in which she tells her experience. .
It is difficult to quantify to what extent those who resort to egg donation tell their own children and those around them. Matching (seeking the maximum physical resemblance between the donor and the surrogate, or the couple if there is one) is a fundamental part of these treatments and has traditionally allowed those who did not want to tell it not to have to do so. Families with children without a genetic link or in which only the father provided the sperm are used to hearing comments like: “she is just like his mother.”
Catalina Roig, egg donation coordinator at the IVI clinic in Palma de Mallorca, believes that “there are still many people who don’t tell it. Maybe because here we are on a small island.” “On the issue of egg donation,” she points out, “we still have a long way to go for people to normalize it more. Maybe if well-known people emerged telling it, that would happen.” In this entity, a giant in the sector that now has 74 centers in nine countries, 31.6% of the cycles carried out last year involved egg donation, and the average age of the patients who opted for this technique was 42 years.
In Spain there is no age limit for patients, but there is a consensus among clinics not to treat women over 50 years of age. Do patients arrive informed about the high incidence? “It depends on the age. Between the ages of 40 and 45, they are still surprised when you diagnose them with low ovarian load and recommend egg donation. In this area, we still find a lot of ignorance. Great, divine girls come, and you tell them that their ovarian reserve is practically zero and it surprises them,” explains Roig.
There are patients who stop there, and prefer not to continue with the treatments if they have to renounce the genetic link, although the percentage of those who do so is not recorded. “There are also many people who tell you: ‘don’t talk to me about egg donation,’ and in the end, when they see that it doesn’t work with their eggs, they change their mind.”
At its center in Mallorca, 40% of the patients come from Germany, a country where it is not allowed to donate eggs. The so-called “reproductive tourism” – the term is questioned, because some consider it offensive – represents an increasingly important portion of the sector’s activity. According to the SEF, the Spanish Fertility Society, more than 12,000 of the 127,000 assisted reproduction cycles that were performed in Spain in 2020, the last year with data collected, were for foreign patients.
“53% and 34% of total treatments use donated eggs and sperm, respectively. That is, only 13% of non-resident couples treated in Spain without living there do so with their own eggs and sperm, and the availability of donated eggs in the country is what mainly attracts these reproductive tourists. A European study indicated a few years ago that around half of Europeans who travel to receive reproductive treatments do so to Spain,” writes Sara Lafuente in Reproductive Markets. “Eggs are at the center of the bioeconomy in Spain,” says the sociologist, who believes that eggs have been placed in a key place to define fertility: “Eggs from third parties are used to define many problems.”
Although it is generally believed that egg donation does not exist in the public sector, Lafuente points out a minority practice that occurs in the Basque health system and also in Andalusia, which involves the so-called “cross donation.” It consists of a woman or a couple who needs donated eggs providing another donor woman, not to use her genetic material but to contribute to that egg bank. “In this way, we seek to ensure that there is no difference in social class or economic situation between recipients and donors, which is what usually happens in the private sector. It also causes problems because there are known cases in which there has been financial compensation on the part of the couple,” she points out.
Their position involves “puncturing the balloon” of the demand for eggs, “taking a step back and resolving the previous problems that generate such a strong demand for egg donation. Many of the people who end up with these treatments did not want them, and they could have been avoided with public policies focused on improving life issues.” That is, create conditions so that maternal age is not delayed so much.
