Kaylene Breeding was always driven by a desire to help other women. In her twenties, she spent years volunteering at women’s charities. That’s when an idea she had considered since high school—donating her eggs—seemed like the “next step” in her volunteering. She would be helping a family in the “utmost way possible,” she recalls thinking.
Breeding, now 36, first heard about egg donation when she was a teenager and her local radio station in Oregon constantly aired commercials inviting young women to become donors. Breeding told me that when she reached her late twenties and wasn’t ready to have children, she decided to do something good with her eggs in the meantime.
Breeding donated her eggs six times. Twice these were “altruistic egg donations,” meaning she was paid by the recipient only for her medical and travel expenses. Her payment for the other donations was between $7,500 and $9,000. Out of all these donations, only one resulted in children. That was a set of twins born to a gay male couple in Israel. All she knows about the children is that they were born.
Today, Breeding, who has no children of her own, is struggling with her own compromised fertility. She is facing a hysterectomy because of severe endometriosis and adenomyosis, debilitating conditions in which endometrial tissue grows where it shouldn’t. She’s in chronic pain during exercise, ovulation, and sex.
Breeding’s doctors believe this is the result of donating her eggs, which required pumping her body with sky-high levels of estrogen. Believe is the key word here, as they can’t quite confirm it. There is little research on the long-term medical consequences of egg donation.
By now Breeding, who works in the aviation industry, knows a lot about those consequences. She is a moderator and administrator of We Are Egg Donors, a private Facebook support and advocacy group that counts over 2,000 past and current members. She reads many stories similar to hers of post-donation medical conditions. “Nobody wants to do the research because, frankly, I’m assuming they’re afraid of what we would discover,” she told me.