Aggregated News
When Catherine Fonseca volunteered as an egg donor, the intake form asked for her SAT scores.
It did not ask if she understood the long-term health implications of stimulating her ovaries to produce a bumper crop of eggs to be extracted and turned over to an infertile couple.
That wasn’t an oversight by the clinic. No one knows the long-term risks to egg donors — if, in fact, there are any. Anecdotally, some women — Fonseca among them — said they experienced an array of health problems after donations, including ovarian cysts and endometriosis, a painful inflammatory disease that can cause infertility.
But there has been little research on the long-term outcomes for egg donors, who are often recruited on college campuses with the promise of tens of thousands in payments if they have particularly desirable characteristics, such as green eyes or high-level tennis skills or Ivy League degrees.
“The bottom line is that we simply don’t know anything for sure, because nobody has followed these women systematically,” said Linda Kahn, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University School of...