The Golden Egg
Couples want their egg donors to be smart, athletic, and good-looking.
![141111_FUT_EggDonorGenes egg donors want good genes.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20141113204327im_/http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/11/141111_FUT_EggDonorGenes.jpg.CROP.promovar-mediumlarge.jpg)
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This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate. On Nov. 20, Future Tense will host “Will the Family Survive the Revolution in Reproductive Technology?” in Washington, D.C. For more information about the event and to RSVP, visit the New America website.
When Dr. Richard Sherbahn founded the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago in 1997 and launched an egg donation program for women struggling to conceive, he started with a pool of just three donors: “a tall brunette, a short brunette, and a blonde,” all white. Back then, Sherbahn writes in his online guide to navigating the donation process, couples in search of a donor would choose quickly from his small selection. But now, “there are thousands of donors available through agencies over the Internet,” and “couples have become much more particular about what they are looking for in their perfect egg donor. A ‘white girl with dark hair’ will rarely be enough to satisfy recipient couples today.” Sherbahn writes that one couple recently came to him looking for a thin, white woman with green eyes and wavy blond hair who stands between 5-feet-7 and 5-feet-8, has Swedish ancestry, played college-level athletics, holds a master’s degree at the very least, and registers a minimum 120 on an IQ test.
When the first American child conceived via a donated egg was born in Los Angeles in 1984, UCLA doctors deemed the boy “just beautiful.” But 30 years later, some recipients of donated eggs are hoping to bear children who inspire more specific superlatives. Last month, the Journal of Women’s Health published a study tracking the preferences of women seeking ovum donations through the Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York, a fertility clinic on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Between 2008 and 2012, researchers administered surveys to more than 400 patients, asking them to weigh the importance of certain qualities in prospective egg donors, including their intelligence levels, mental and physical health, athleticism, physical appearance, and ethnicity. In those five years, the study found no shift in preferences for donors “who displayed a physically ‘similar appearance’ or shared a ‘similar gene pool’ ” with the recipients. But the preference for more a broadly desirable résumé skyrocketed: The percentage of couples prioritizing donors in good health increased from 50 percent in 2008 to 72 percent in 2012; those seeking donors with demonstrable “athletic ability” increased from 1 percent to 17 percent; and those stating a preference for high intelligence increased from 18 percent to 55 percent.
An unprecedented demand for smarter, better, faster babies inspires an uncomfortable bioethical image. But Dr. Georgia Witkin, a clinical psychologist who works with donors and recipients at RMA, paints a more empathetic picture of the trend. The study’s results suggest that prospective parents are less interested in creating a “child who looks like an exact clone of themselves” and increasingly invested in priming their offspring for success. That shift could speak to the normalization of racially blended families, gay and lesbian parents, and the role of donated egg and sperm in American conception. (Nearly half of couples surveyed in 2012 said they planned to inform future kiddos of the role of a third party in their origin stories.)
But the increased acceptance of egg donation as an infertility treatment strategy has also inspired intensified demands for the specific genetic instructions that the ovum will provide. Witkin says that it’s often the same couples who come to the clinic requesting donors scoring high marks for health, athleticism, and smarts. As she puts it: “They’re looking for the package.” The expectation for genetic excellence is not specific to eggs—one California sperm bank requires all donors to attend or have graduated from a four-year university, stand more than 5-feet-9, and be “the best”—but with egg donation, the stakes are raised. Banks sell sperm for several hundred dollars, but IVF treatments run in the tens of thousands, so the couples who exercise the option are themselves more likely to have benefited from the privileges of higher education, art programs, and organized sports, and many of these high-standard patients are seeking donors who reflect back their own creative impulses or impressive educational achievements (if not their Swedish ancestry). But some of them are still seeking an outside edge: “The couples who ask about athletic achievements are often not themselves very athletic,” Witkin says. “They just think it would be good for the child.”
And these days, couples who ask for the full package shall receive it. That’s partly because the pool of potential egg donors has increased in the past couple of decades, but it’s also because clinic metrics for evaluating a donor’s genetic fitness have evolved. (Who knows? Maybe the three white ladies in Sherbahn’s initial donor pool were brilliant Olympian models, too.) Now, when a young woman comes to RMA interested in donating her eggs, she submits extensive details about her educational background, job history, and hobbies, as well as those of her immediate family members. (“A donor might be Phi Beta Kappa,” Witkin says, but she could be carrying genes from a relative with less impressive credentials.) The clinic administers basic tests measuring comprehension and reasoning skills—Witkin wouldn’t disclose the specifics of the exams, lest donors get ahold of the questions beforehand—but it also relies on alternate strategies for gauging smarts. A donor, Witkin says, may not have pursued higher education due to her family situation or finances, but perhaps she excels on the stage, or was raised by parents who built a successful restaurant business from the ground up, or has a brother who has risen to a high military rank—all pluses on a donor application. Medical histories and blood tests produce highly specified pictures of the donor’s genetic predisposition to diabetes, mental illness, or heart disease, which can help recipients looking to avoid doubling up on problem genes that run in their own families. Donors are also screened for depression (which could compromise their ability to undergo the hormone-heavy donation process), STIs (which lead to immediate disqualification), and pathological lying (which might cast doubt on the intel provided in their applications). RMA wants a donor who looks good on paper, but Witkin cautions: “You don’t want a donor who tries to make herself look too good.”