By Charlene Lin
Note: A revised version of this article was the Honorable Mention of the 2025 Jean Anderson Social Justice Award.
I had just started graduate school at Columbia University, and the words of my mother back in Taiwan still haunted me: “You will not get a PENNY from this family!” Though she eventually gave in, my parents are by no means wealthy, and I still felt guilty for taking some of their hard-earned money to satisfy my extravagant dream of studying abroad.
I tapped the “learn more” button at the bottom of one of the ads and was immediately greeted by an aggressive chatbot who dove right into quizzing me about my height, BMI, and drinking and drug use habits.
I shut the window, but the company, Blossom California Fertility, an egg donor recruitment firm based in California, kept sending me direct messages through Instagram, urging me to finish the questions. I eventually agreed to talk to an Asian case manager.
The woman, who said her name was Max Vollstedt, kept emphasizing that most people don’t feel much discomfort in the process.
She said with my Ivy League profile, I could expect upwards of $30,000 for each attempt to produce eggs for donation – which I later learned was roughly triple the standard compensation for egg donors in the United States.
Then she noted I’d be paid less than a Chinese or Japanese Ivy League donor, who is “in smaller supply,” adding, “We already have a lot of Taiwanes as egg donors.”
Within two days, Vollstedt sent me my first offer of $25,000 for my first cycle, which included going through checkups, hormone injections for about ten days, and an egg retrieval done at the clinic my intended parents assigned me to.
But her pushy attitude made me skeptical. She started to talk about my second donation before I even said yes to the first one. She asked me to do two cycles within three months.
From the stories I’ve read, I know injecting hormones and stimulating the ovaries can cause a lot of discomfort, such as bloating and swollen ovaries. Some couldn’t conceive and needed to look for an egg donor themselves after multiple donations.
I replied with health risks concerns as I knew according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, one is not suggested to donate more than six times in a lifetime.
Vollstedt told me that it’s not six times in a lifetime, but six times in a year. “The maximum a clinic will take is about 10 to 12 times,” she said.
I politely turned it down.
Two days later, she sent me an offer of $31,000, then $35,000, with a 2-day deadline for an answer.
Meanwhile, I got a message from other donor recruiting firms I’d never contacted. One manager at an egg donation agency in California, who asked to remain anonymous, sent me a message through LinkedIn with a link to a profile, asking if it was me.
“Sorry to bother you. I got your profile and seems like the intended parents are asking around about you,” the woman told me. “I was wondering who’s profile is this excellent, and I didn’t expect that you’re so easy to find.”
But the profile she sent wasn’t the one I created. It used information and photos from my Instagram and LinkedIn accounts without my consent, and the majority of the information wasn’t true. Both my parents are Taiwanese, but this profile said my father is Chinese. I was also listed as three inches taller, given new hobbies like traveling and jogging, and purple as my favorite color.
My photos were also manipulated. In one, I had cartoonishly round eyes, and in another, a drastically sloped jawline.
Perhaps most disturbing: In the application, I stated I was willing to be contacted by the intended parents, but my profile said I wanted to remain anonymous. This seemed to ensure that the intended parents would have no way of knowing they had been deceived.
I withdrew from the process, but kept digging into the rapidly expanding and largely unregulated world of egg donation. In online forums in my native Taiwan, women share their experiences flying to the U.S. to donate their eggs for only a third of what I had been promised.
“Some agencies could make profiles with your information and put it in their donor database to attract clients, even when they don’t really know you,” the Taiwanese manager said. She said it’s a way for the agencies to attract clients and stay hopeful.
In 2020, the US egg donation market size was estimated at $684 million, up from $80 million in 2011, and is expected to grow at an annual rate of 12 percent, according to Transparency Market Research and Justine Levy, who filed an antitrust lawsuit on the pricing of human eggs in 2011.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been surveying fertility clinics on assisted reproductive procedures since 1995. The agency has published some of the data from the annual surveys – mostly on the number and type of “cycles” performed by the clinics, defined as ”when a woman begins taking fertility drugs or having her ovaries monitored for follicle production.”
Procedures done on egg donors, specifically, have skyrocketed since then: from 3,301 attempted cycles using donor eggs in 1995, to 28,320 in 2021, the most recent data available, my analysis found. The number of cycles involving donor eggs – including the frozen and fresh ones – increased almost eight-fold.
The CDC also tracks some demographic information about the egg donors themselves, but doesn’t make that information public, according to the CDC website.
There are now 453 fertility clinics across the US, with the largest clusters in California, Northeast Coast, Texas, Florida, and Illinois. These states also tend to have a stronger focus on donor eggs.
But recurring news articles, court filings and medical journals on this matter suggests that misconduct in the booming industry is prevalent and persistent, particularly with third-party service providers like the ones that reached out to me, which are virtually unregulated.
“There are people in this business who commit fraud every day. Every. Single. Day,“ said Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a California-based fertility doctor who has hosted the weekly Egg Whisperer Show since 2017.
So far, only 15 states have introduced some level of regulations purporting to protect donors and would-be parents from fertility fraud, such as misrepresentation of donor information, misusing donor tissues, or inseminating patients with physician’s sperm without written consent.
However, in most of those states, the regulations only apply to licensed clinics and healthcare providers – not third-party recruiting agencies.
Among the 21 states that already enacted or are introducing some level of regulations on fertility fraud, 20 designed the law to only specifically regulate the healthcare provider, and the majority of which designed the law based on the well-known cases where male doctors inseminated patients with their own sperm.
At the same time, parents who secure donated eggs through third-party agencies are often charged a higher price than if they went through a clinic.
In 2020 and 2021, Bailey K. Sanders, Assistant Professor at Duke University School of Law, surveyed 505 egg donation clinics and agencies from every state and found that third-party agencies pay, on average, 22% more than those who donated directly through the clinic.
The prospective parents also have to pay the agencies additional legal and administrative fees that they wouldn’t pay a clinic.
But they’re willing to do it because these agencies aggressively seek out “elite” eggs, based on exacting standards on things like education, ethnicity, and SAT scores, Abigail Anthony wrote in The New Atlantis.
“On some agency websites, they marked some donors as ‘premium,’” said Mary, a prospective parent who’s been browsing many donor databases. She asked to go by a pseudonym.
However, despite paying more for third-party services, prospective parents have little recourse if they find out they’ve been deceived. It usually takes years of litigation in the civil court and hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal fees to seek judicial remedies for industry misconduct.
“A lot of times, the intended parents don't take it beyond just being upset,” Eyvazzadeh said.
“They’re already coming from a place of trauma, and most people don’t want their struggles with childbearing made public through a lawsuit,” she said, adding filing a lawsuit makes their personal information public. “I think a lot of agencies know that.”
Donating eggs involves a demanding process where donors undergo one to three hormone injections daily for up to two weeks to stimulate egg production. The retrieval procedure involves extracting eggs via a needle inserted through the vaginal wall, which can lead to discomfort, cramping, and bloating.
Short-term potential complications include ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, causing severe abdominal pain and fluid accumulation. No academic research has been done on tracking long-term health risks, but some women reported that their fertility diminished.
Diane Tober, a medical anthropologist, said she interviewed a donor who had some complications with a donation of about $20,000. The agency wanted her to donate again, but she turned it down out of health concerns. The agency kept offering her higher prices, and at $75,000, she agreed.
"She ended up having some really, really bad complications and now wasn't able to have grown children at all," said Tober. "She and her husband need an egg donor."
Lala Chang, a thirty-year-old Taiwanese woman, connected with me through Dcard, a Taiwanese online forum where Taiwanese egg donors, mostly in their 20s, share their experiences of donating eggs in the United States.
She told me that her third-party agent asked her to wear high-heeled shoes to the fertility clinic in Los Angeles, so the doctor wouldn’t notice her height was exaggerated.
The woman who reached out to me on LinkedIn said it’s common practice for donor information like height to be exaggerated to fit common parent preferences.
“If a donor is 5’3, we would probably go for 5’5, conservatively,” the manager said.
Eyvazzadeh added that she’s also seen donors lie on their profiles.
“I also had one donor walk in with a wig on. She was bald. She had a condition where she pulled all her hair out.”
“I will never forget about it,” Eyvazzadeh said.
Due to the lack of transparency for both the donor and recipient sides, the trust in medical professionals, and the desperation of intended parents who have tried to conceive for many years to no avail, most cases of misconduct would not come to light unless there is a visible destruction in embryos or eggs or the conceived child started to show signs of disabilities at least a decade after.
Media coverage on the assisted reproductive treatments world has been largely about physicians inseminating their patients without consent and the cases where one donor’s sperm gets distributed so widely that people find their half-siblings everywhere.
Egg donation, unlike sperm donation, has fewer concerns about large pools of half-siblings, and thus the errors and misconduct involved are less detectable and very underreported.
“There is no regulation,“ said Danielle Winston, the founder of The Seed Scout, a sperm donation agency that emphasizes ethical and known donation. “There's no law that criminalizes this at all or has any repercussion for anyone with bad intent.”
Eyvazzadeh said that the industry is without record-keeping, and she wished to establish a registry system herself to track donor history and medical updates.
“I had an egg donor who had donated over 24 times. She was changing her name and donating. She's maxing out all the egg banks for providing fraudulent ID cards,” she said.
According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the suggested limit of egg donation should be six times in a lifetime to avoid ovarian health issues.
Eyvazzadeh said she only found out because the doctor she sent the donor for monitoring and ultrasound told her that the donor had been to the clinic three times that year.
The fertility industry has been around for about 40 years since the first IVF (in vitro fertilization) baby was born, according to the National Institutes of Health Statistics (NIH). The general fertility rate in the U.S. has reached a historic low and is still decreasing.
The demand for assisted reproductive technology (ART) has been growing nonstop as women are delaying their conception rate due to better access to higher education and career prospects and high expectations for a life partner, according to the research of Co-Fertility, a startup company focusing on ethical egg donation and egg freezing.
The demand is rising, while the regulation does not seem to be in place.
No state or federal agency randomly selects donor profiles to ensure that they aren’t fabricated, nor are there any federal or state laws that require clinics and third-party recruiting firms to verify the information on the profiles – even critical medical history information.
Agencies have been found by clients to fabricate profiles, presenting donors as healthier, smarter, and more attractive and desired than they are. Intended parents, desperate for a child, often have no idea that the person they've chosen to help them create their family isn’t who they think they are.
“I’m always in the dark and seem to be only wishing for the best,” said Mary, 37, who turned to egg donors after six years of failed attempts at fertility treatments using her own eggs.
Mary, an attractive and accomplished Chinese woman based in California, was told at the age of 32 that her ovary reserve was very limited. After six years of IVF treatment to no avail, she and her husband turned to egg donor agencies.
“At the beginning, I wanted a donor with a celebrity profile,” Hsu said.
But Mary said in her search for the “celebrity” donor who also shared a similar ethnic and educational background, she has struggled to verify the profiles, and when she was able to, she often found out that the donors were very different from what she saw on the profile, or she would be told that the donor who looked ideal had backed out.
According to Daisy Deomampo, a cultural and medical anthropologist who focuses on reproductive health and its social justice issues, prospective parents often look for donors with specific characteristics, especially ethnicity and education attainments.
“What it often lines up with is a certain kind of social position or status translating,” said Deomampo.
Most egg donation cycles are within the range of $8,000 to $10,000. However, extremely high compensation occurs when donors are considered extremely rare – often when they are of a specific cultural and ethnic heritage such as East Asian or genetically Jewish, where the demand is far greater than the available donors, or of desirable physical appearance and achievements that endorse the donors’ intelligence, physical abilities, or a specific talent.
“We had someone who once came to us saying they wanted someone who is Persian or Iranian – who is over six feet, who went to an Ivy League school, and had a second degree that's higher than a master’s,” said Winston.
The website “We Are Egg Donors” publishes articles on egg donor experiences by interviewing donors, researchers, or posting articles from donors. In one, an anonymous writer confessed that she “lied her ass off” to sell her eggs out of financial desperation.
She said she omitted family history that included ovarian cancer, schizophrenia, autism, substance use, and obesity, and her own history of drug abuse and mental health struggles, which included a month as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital.
She said the agency never bothered to fact-check her claims, and she was paid $30,000 for two cycles.
“Agencies have to know that there wouldn’t be enough egg donors to meet demand if they fact-checked our applications. And without egg donors, an egg donor agency would be out of business,” she wrote.
Eyvazzadeh said she had a similar experience with an agency representing an egg donor who claimed to have a Harvard degree. The agency asked for $75,000 for her compensation but never got the donor’s transcripts. Eyvazzadeh said when she asked for it, the donor forged a Harvard diploma, which she found out by contacting Harvard’s registrar's office.
Aimee said, “The agency’s reply was, ‘She said she lives in Boston.’ And I'm like, ‘Wow, that's how you do things now? You don’t check on things. That meant she went to Harvard? And that was enough for the agencies?’”
“It (fact-checking) costs money. They're not going to invest in the money. They're just there to sign people up on a website, and then someone else will pay for the screening, and the victims (of fertility fraud) are who pay for the screening.”
Until today, the majority of prospective egg donors are listed as anonymous.
“Among the more than 200 donations I’ve handled, only two were known donations,” said the Taiwanese egg donation manager who reached out to me. “And those two turned into known donations because they tested positive for STI (sexually transmitted infections), which made the disclosure of their identity required.”
However, several industry experts told me the intention to stay anonymous among donors is actually rare.
“I have not met any donor who’s unwilling to meet the intended parents,” said Eyvazzadeh, “Not a single one.”
“Almost every donor I talked to said that they would be happy to connect with the intended parents,” said Diane Tober, a medical anthropologist who’s interviewed more than 300 egg donors for her research.
According to the experts, donors tend to be curious and find helping others conceive fulfilling, and are more than happy to share the joy and connect with the intended parents.
Without a clear link between donor and recipient, agencies can more easily manipulate donor profiles, potentially exaggerating qualifications or hiding important health information.
Angela Woodhead, 37, said she was diagnosed with Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT), a genetic disease that could cause the rupture of an aneurysm leading to unexpected death, after three anonymous egg donations in California from 2010 to 2016.
“I wasn't really given the option of an open donation or non-anonymous donation,” she said.
Woodhead expressed her interest in an open donation in her last donation in 2016 when she learned that the intended parents wanted a known donation. Still, she was told right before the medical process that the parents had changed their minds.
She struggled to find her recipient parents, but the third-party agency she donated through, San Francisco Donor Network, was no longer operating, and the founder claimed to be away traveling and did not end up helping.
She asked the clinic to pass through the information and was met with many roadblocks. Initially, the clinic did not respond, and after multiple attempts, they asked for a specific genetic test result as proof to make them warn the families.
She expressed that she was about to have brain surgery soon, and there was a chance she would not wake up from it.
“I think it would be best to wait and see if you have a mutation and get all the information about testing for the children before we notify them,” the clinic replied to her in an email.
“Is my doctor’s diagnosis not enough? Is the fact that I need brain surgery not enough for you?” asked Woodhead.
The clinic eventually agreed to notify the parents after receiving genetic test results, but they never updated her about it.
Until today, she has no idea whether the clinic has passed on the information to the recipient families.
Danielle Winston helped her find one family with background checks. The mother has been taking the child to the doctor nonstop about the reoccurring symptoms. Only with both known biological parents, the child can get tested for the disease at a younger age.
“This is why it's so important,” said Winston, “Because without that information, you only know half of the puzzle.”
Now a mother herself, Woodhead said she wishes anonymous donation wasn’t an option.
“I was more scared for the donor-conceived children,” Woodhead recounted what was on her mind before her own brain surgery for the disease.
“That complete lack of control over people who are just as related to me as my own children was really scary,” she said. “I just felt really helpless.”
“You know, it seems like both sides of us are not protected,” said Mary Hsu, the intended mother who has been trying for more than six years and got disappointed countless times.
“Eventually, I got way too exhausted,” said Hsu. “My motivation wore out. I have almost given up.”