Why This Film?

For over 30 years, young women have been providing eggs to help other people have children. But we know little about their motivations, how they feel about the process, or how they think about the children born from their eggs. We also do not know how egg donation impacts women’s health.

There are many films that address the struggles of people who desperately want children and cannot, and their emotional—and international—quests to have a child with donor eggs or gestational surrogates.

But what about the women who provide the “missing puzzle piece” for other people’s babies? What are their stories?

Egg donors often remain silent, anonymous, and hidden behind the medical curtain that separates them from the people who will raise their genetic child. They supply “DNA,” but they’re not “mothers,” and sometimes they are not treated as equal patients.

In 2013, I started working with a former egg donor and one of the founders of We Are Egg Donors to conduct a research project, exploring egg donors' decisions and experiences. In her self-advocacy group, there were a lot of young women, current and former donors, who had a lot of questions about what the potential risks were and were curious about other women's experiences. Many of their questions went unanswered by the agencies or by the physicians who were performing the procedures. While many of the women had no problems with their donations, as the group began to grow, more and more women joined who had had strange symptoms during and since their donations--such as severe endometriosis, infertility, cancer, thyroid problems, irregular cycles, bloating, shortness of breath, and other things that caused them concern. They wanted to know if any of these symptoms could have been connected to their egg donations, but with the lack of research available, they could only speculate.

As these stories began to emerge, I thought it was important to move beyond the research project and do a documentary film that would be more accessible to the women who might consider egg donation, as well as to the general public, to increase awareness of what egg donors go through.

This is an important step in improving standards of care and consistency between agencies and clinics, and in providing women who want to donate/sell their eggs with the necessary information to advocate for themselves.

As one donor puts it, "Right now I'd give egg donation a C. And I'd like it to be an A+ for everyone."

Aside from the women in this film, to date we have conduct research with over 100 egg donors. If you are a current or former egg donor, or are considering egg donation, please feel free to contact us and be part of this important research. For more information, please contact: eggdonorresearch@ucsf.edu.

Thanks for your interest in our film.

Best,

Diane

Producer/Director