One's choice of whether to do this or not is obviously highly personal, but as someone who has become a mother through the same procedure as is required to retrieve eggs in an egg-donation procedure, I have to say that the medical process is not nearly so dramatic or risky for a healthy woman to do as the author makes it sound in this very brief statement. it's a series of not-painful hormone injections for several weeks followed by a quick (30 minutes) egg retrieval under anesthesia, generally with minimal recovery if any. I've done it three times so far, without incident whatsoever, and so has every woman who has a child via IVF.
I think the questions Ms. Berkenwald raises pertain much more to the fundamental questions about having biokids or adopting, and in that regard they are completely interesting! However, with regard to egg donation, the topic is one faced every day by straight couples, single women and lesbians who choose a sperm donor in order to conceive -- i.e. whether to choose someone of a particular ethnic background in addition to other characteristics. Egg donation, while definitely a bigger commitment of effort, is much the same otherwise as sperm donation, which has been happening a great deal for over two decades.
[To add to the reflections that are relevant: friends of mine, a lesbian couple, also debated sperm-donor characteristics. One wanted a donor who was of Russian-Polish Jewish peasant stock, both to mirror her own (non-bio-mom) ethnic background and because she wanted a potential child to carry that weight of Jewishness in a particular way; her partner didn't care about biology, but wanted a donor who clearly identified as being Jewish in his adult life, as she wanted to minimize the chances that a potential child would meet the donor one day and be drawn to another religion of his.]
I imagine that many people facing donor choices want to retain some of the familial ease that others do who do not have to go through fertility treatments -- it's an interesting thing when we expect folks with fertility issues (whether biological or social) to deal with these ethnic/biological/adoption issues when we do not put that same pressure on fertile straight couples to nearly the same extent...
One's choice of whether to do this or not is obviously highly personal, but as someone who has become a mother through the same procedure as is required to retrieve eggs in an egg-donation procedure, I have to say that the medical process is not nearly so dramatic or risky for a healthy woman to do as the author makes it sound in this very brief statement. it's a series of not-painful hormone injections for several weeks followed by a quick (30 minutes) egg retrieval under anesthesia, generally with minimal recovery if any. I've done it three times so far, without incident whatsoever, and so has every woman who has a child via IVF.
I think the questions Ms. Berkenwald raises pertain much more to the fundamental questions about having biokids or adopting, and in that regard they are completely interesting! However, with regard to egg donation, the topic is one faced every day by straight couples, single women and lesbians who choose a sperm donor in order to conceive -- i.e. whether to choose someone of a particular ethnic background in addition to other characteristics. Egg donation, while definitely a bigger commitment of effort, is much the same otherwise as sperm donation, which has been happening a great deal for over two decades.
[To add to the reflections that are relevant: friends of mine, a lesbian couple, also debated sperm-donor characteristics. One wanted a donor who was of Russian-Polish Jewish peasant stock, both to mirror her own (non-bio-mom) ethnic background and because she wanted a potential child to carry that weight of Jewishness in a particular way; her partner didn't care about biology, but wanted a donor who clearly identified as being Jewish in his adult life, as she wanted to minimize the chances that a potential child would meet the donor one day and be drawn to another religion of his.]
I imagine that many people facing donor choices want to retain some of the familial ease that others do who do not have to go through fertility treatments -- it's an interesting thing when we expect folks with fertility issues (whether biological or social) to deal with these ethnic/biological/adoption issues when we do not put that same pressure on fertile straight couples to nearly the same extent...