Let Us Now Praise Famous Eggs

Google "pregnant celebrities over 40," and you get over 20 million page results. Yes, there are a lot of them in Hollywood, but it isn't because of age-defying seaweed wraps or chemical peels. Those have no effect on ovaries.

It's because of IVF procedures and donor eggs.

As I've mentioned before:

• By 35, women have a 10% chance of getting pregnant each month. The miscarriage rate is 25% 
• After 40, 90% of a woman’s eggs are genetically abnormal 
• After 44, women have a less than 1% chance of getting pregnant with their own eggs even if they use IVF.

This means that Hollywood moms are using IVF and egg donors behind closed doctor's curtains, and they're trying to keep it on the down-low in an effort to preserve their youthful image.

Conversely, the purpose of this post is to out them.

~~~

Donor Egg Moms Who Used Surrogates
This group is pretty easy to identify since almost all women who use surrogates also use egg donors. Many women try to suggest that their surrogates are carrying babies fertilized with their own eggs, and this could be true for younger women (as in the case of Dennis Quaid's wife who was 36), but among women over 40, it doesn't really work that way.
* Giuliana Rancic is having a baby via surrogate at 37. (Fingers crossed for a healthy baby due summer 2012.)

Joan Lunden had two sets of twins via surrogate when she was 42 and 44.

Sarah Jessica Parker used a surrogate to conceive her twins at 44.

Angela Bassett had twins via surrogate when she was 47.

Annie Leibowitz had twins via surrogate at 56.

Cheryl Tiegs used a surrogate to deliver twins when she was 53. I love her story best because she told Larry King that they were conceived using her own eggs, which pretty much means she's crazy.

~~~

Donor Egg Moms Who Carried Pregnancies Themselves
This group is tougher to guess at, but when it comes to moms over 44, it's fairly safe to assume they've used donors. For women closer to 40, it's less obvious, although twins are a pretty big clue, especially if their babies follow years of infertility. Anyhow, here's my list:
Nicole Kidman had a baby at 40 and another at 42. A third baby was born a year after that via surrogate. With all her history of infertility and miscarriage during her 30s, I suspect that she used donor eggs for all three.

Patrick Dempsey's wife had twins at 41. Considering the 5 year gap between this pregnancy and their first daughter, I'm going with egg donor.

Mariah Carey delivered twins at 42 after years of struggling with infertility. She credits the miracle pregnancy to acupuncture. I credit it to an egg donor.

Iman had a baby at 44. A successful IVF is possible, but statistically unlikely. I'm going with egg donor.

Jane Seymour delivered twins at 44. Donor.

Marcia Gay Harden had twins at 44. Donor.

Mary Stuart Masterson was pregnant with twins at 44. Egg donor. [She was supposedly due summer 2011, although I haven't seen any reports about a successful delivery, so hopefully things didn't take a bad turn for her.]

Marcia Cross gave birth to twins at 44. She's admitted to going through IVF treatments but not to using donor eggs. She has, however, acknowledged that egg donation exists. Baby steps.

Mimi Rogers had a baby at 45. Egg donor.

Susan Sarandon had babies at 42 and 46. Egg donor. (Although the kid she had at 39 obviously has her genetics.)

Jane Kaczmarek had babies at 42, 44, and 47. Donor, donor, and donor.

Kelly Preston had a baby at 47. Donor.

Holly Hunter and Nancy Grace each had twins at 47. Donors.

Bridget Jones scribe Helen Fielding gave birth at 43 and 48. Donor, obviously.

Geena Davis gave birth to twins at 48. Egg donor fer shur.

Beverly D'Angelo had a baby at 49. That's forty-NINE.

* Elizabeth Edwards had kids when she was 48 and 50.

Annie Leibowitz gave birth when she was 51. Obvee. [As noted above, she subsequently used a surrogate for twins.]

Jennifer Aniston isn't pregnant, but she's 43 and a long-time heavy smoker, so I'm calling it early: egg donor.

~~~

IVF Moms
Then there are the celebrity moms who have done IVF. Again, I'm totally fabricating this list based on assumptions, but twins are a giveaway, and singletons born to moms close to 40 are suspect, too. My guess is that many of these women have also used donors, but I'm less sure of these than I am of the group above.
Rebecca Romijn had twins at 36. It's possible that this was natural, but I was infertile at 35, and we used the same wedding photographer, so I'm going with IVF.

Julia Roberts had twins at 37 and a singleton at 40. Definitely IVF. [More specifically, my guess is that the second pregnancy was a frozen embryo transfer leftover from her first cycle's retrieval.]

Jennifer Lopez had twins at 39. IVF for sure. Egg donor possible.

Lisa Marie Presley gave birth to twins at 40. IVF for sure. Egg donor possible.

Courtney Cox Arquette had a baby at 41 after years of struggling with infertility. Definitely IVF. Probably egg donor.

Julianna Margulies had a baby at 41. IVF is likely, particularly since it was her first child. Possible egg donor.

Diana Krall had twins at 41. IVF for sure. Egg donor possible.

Molly Ringwald had twins at 41. IVF for sure. Egg donor possible.

Celine Dion had six IVF cycles and a miscarriage and then finally gave birth at 42. It's possible that the 7th try was the charm, but an egg donor is more likely.

Angelina Jolie is pregnant with her second set of twins. I realize that she's only 36, but - as my friend A pointed out - the odds of having two sets of twins is pretty low. That combined with the fact that she's crazy makes it clear that she's using IVF. Own egg, though. And Pitt sperm, obviously. I mean, wouldn't you?

~~~

I suppose there should be some moral to this blog post: something about how bad it is that these upper-class, professional female role models are perpetuating the myth that you don't have to start worrying about your biological clock until you're 45 even though the true start-worrying age is 27, and how bad it is that celebrities are setting real-life women up for failure when instead what they could be doing is educating folks that ovaries expire, and that women would be wise to make more informed decisions when it comes to their plans for family-building, and that the only way to do that is to reject the illusion of Hollywood youth, glamor, and invincibility once and for all.

But, whatever.

Right now I just feel like outing them.

~~~

* Update, April 24, 2012: With the announcement of Bill and Giuliana Rancic's surrogate pregnancy, I decided to keep this log updated as pregnancy news emerges. Names preceded by asterisks denote additions made after the initial post.

Forty Vignettes

I turn 40 next week.

I remember my mother when she was 40. I was 18, so it's not hard to recall. She still turned heads with her beauty and sexy stylishness, but 40 was when she started to seem old to me. Her skin especially. Her hands were softer, almost rubbery. I remember pinching her elbows and counting how long it would take for the skin to bounce back. Sometimes it took a full two seconds.

"Look how old your skin is," I would tell her.
"I know," she'd say. "I'm very old."

My elbow skin takes less than a second to bounce back, which makes me luckier than her, I suppose. On the other hand, my mother was still fertile at 40. I know she was fertile because the summer before I went away to college, my dad told me that she had become pregnant, had an abortion, and had her tubes tied.

She was too old for a baby.

~~~

In 40 days, I begin Delestrogen injections for my donor egg cycle.

In related news, I learned that my donor works at a gardening store, which is why May is the earliest that she can travel for the retrieval. March and April are very busy months for her at the nursery.

There's a critical timeline for sowing seeds, and Spring only lasts so long.

~~~

There are 40 women on the PVED Spring 2012 thread who are cycling with donor eggs around the same time as me.

Out of these 40 women, several have cycled in the past. Some were successful, and some weren't. Many have gone through the whole donor egg process only to end up with a negative pregnancy test. A few women had positives but then miscarried as late as 15 weeks. Two women gave birth around 25 weeks, held their babies for a few days, and then watched them die.

40 women on the thread means 40 stories of infertility. 40 versions of grief and loss. 40 shades of hope that no one hopes for.

We're 40 women cycling through a medical procedure with a 50% success rate, which means that 20 of us will fall on the wrong side of the odds. And as it happens, the first woman in our group transferred two embryos last week, and her pregnancy test came back yesterday. It was negative.

1 down. 39 to go.

~~~

40 is the number of dollars this cycle costs - that is, if you take that number, put a comma after it, and then add three zeros.

I don't know how we managed to throw that kind of money together, and I don't have a back-up plan for what to do if this doesn't work. I just can't think about it.

Someone on PVED recently asked if anyone is afraid that their donor egg cycle won't work.

Um ... yes.

Battlestar Portlandia

I'm mostly a movie junkie, but I've been known to get drawn in to really good television, and right now I'm obsessed with Battlestar Galactica.

I just watched Season 2, Episode 5 where Starbuck has been kidnapped by the enemy Cylons and is being held hostage and drugged in a hospital called "The Farm."



And Starbuck isn't alone. Dozens of women are trapped there, all having their reproductive systems experimented on, their ovaries prodded, and their eggs harvested so that the big robot Cylons can make little baby Cylons.

I can relate. To the Cylons, that is.

And with all the costs and delays that have been going on with my cycle, I was just thinking that I should do exactly the same thing. If I found someone who didn't make too much of a fuss about being abducted, it could really work out.

Now, obviously I know that just because a woman is fertile, that doesn't mean she wants to have her eggs harvested, fertilized, and transferred into another woman's body. I appreciate that she'd have reservations, which is why I would to explain to her that the process would be short, that it's just a few eggs, and that I really want a baby.

I'm sure she'll understand.

I hadn't told anyone about my plan, but as it happened, I went out for Lebanese food with JM, and halfway through our veggie mezza platter, she pointed out that our waitress would make a great genetic parent to my children.

"Yeah, I guess she would," I said, as if I hadn't already been thinking it.

When the waitress brought our dolmas, I noticed how lovely and thick her hair was, and I imagined that its darkness combined with N's curls would be gorgeous on either a boy or a girl. She seemed healthy - not too thin but definitely in good enough shape that her my kids would probably be athletic, and since I've always wanted a basketball hoop in my driveway, I knew that kidnapping our waitress was the right decision.

I turned back to my falafel and considered next steps. The fact that JM suggested our waitress made me wonder if she'd help. JM does have a thing for reading horror books, although to be reasonable, that could be strictly recreational. More in my favor, though, is that JM has chickens whose eggs she steals every morning before dawn, and if you think about it, keeping chickens caged in your backyard is not that different from abduction, systematic-drugging, and organ-harvesting.

On the other hand, JM does have a level of empathy that might get in the way. She's got this über-feminist, "my-body-my-choice" streak, so she might take issue with my plan. Plus, now that I think about it, my clinic might have a few concerns, too; the waitress would need several medical exams, and I suspect that you can only bring in a patient unconscious so many times before they start asking questions.

By the time my pita spooned up the last of the hummus, my hopes were fading and reality was setting in. There were too many kinks in my underdeveloped plan, and my dreams of a Cylon-inspired reproduction farm were dashed. I had no choice but to go with my current donor - however long and expensive the process would be.

The plates in front of us were empty save a few sad sprigs of wilted parsley around the edges. As our waitress came to collect them, she unabashedly showed off the straight teeth, perfect posture, and long legs that my kids would never inherit.

"Anything else I can offer you?" she asked.

"Now that you mention it," I said, overwhelmed by both despair and garlic, "I'd love your ... baklava."

Charades

When I search for a donor, I look for something of myself in her, but I've never understood why. What's the point? Am I trying to fool myself?

I've been asking myself these questions for weeks, thinking that they were rhetorical, and then the other day I realized that they aren't rhetorical. That the answer is Yes. I am trying to fool myself. I am actually searching for a donor who looks enough like me so that my babies might let me forget that we aren't genetically related.

Never mind how this could possibly work. Why would I do this? It's an awful lot of trouble to go through when the tricker and the trickee are the same person. I threw out a bunch of different possibilities, and when I started crying, I knew I'd discovered the reason:

It's not the loss of my genes. It's the death of my heritage.

I'm a first generation American and the product of a lineage whose survival was doubtful. My parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents have stories of hunger, discrimination, persecution, flight, and death. I've heard these tales over and over again, told to me in third world accents during turmeric-spiced dinners - descriptions of where my grandmother laid the beds in their 2 bedroom apartment to accommodate 10 children, and how my aunt's fingers were broken when she was 8 because she tried to learn to write her name.

And the story of my father who had one set of clothes growing up: a pair of pajamas that he both slept and went to school in. When enough time had passed, and they were finally too small and torn in equal parts, my dad was so excited to be getting something new - not because of the updated wardrobe, but because then his mom would take his old pjs, wrap them up in twine, and give it to him so he'd have a ball to play with.

These stories of endurance are the stories of my blood, and my blood won't be passed on to my kids. The loss of all this history is too profound for me to swallow right now, and I'm just not yet ready to bury my grandparents lineage. What this means is that I'm committed to selecting a donor who can help me pretend this isn't happening. I'm going ahead with the charade, and I'm looking for an ally in my self-deception.

After several days of toggling between profiles of brown-skinned, black-haired women, a new donor came up. She's from my family's part of the world, and there's something about her that reminds me of my father's mother, of my mother's sister, and of me. She could work.

If we conspire together, this woman's genetic babies and I could nurse the sham for a little longer. I know that more time, more tears, and more therapy will help me accept that my children won't have my past in them, but I can't think about that right now. I'm too busy creating a future where early on Sunday mornings, when eyes like my grandmother's look back at me, I might be able to snooze for 5 more minutes before waking up.

Losing Las Vegas

Our second donor fell through.

Turns out she's a flake. It took her an eternity to fill out the paperwork, but we let it pass because she apologized profusely and convinced us that she was a changed person. Now she's gone a week without responding to any phone calls, emails, or texts. Sigh.

N says we shouldn't have trusted a woman from Las Vegas who dresses like a stripper. I suppose he has a point, but it doesn't make this any easier. I bonded to her. I mean, she asked to see our photo; I thought that was a sign she was committed. It wasn't.

OK, added to my criteria: someone who looks like she can keep her clothes on.

In the meantime, I'm really, really bummed.

Will the Real Mom Please Stand Up?

At some point, someone will ask me the single most upsetting question about my future kid's donor:

Do you ever wonder about the real mom?

Obviously the person asking will either be an idiot or an asshole, but either way I'll know what they're thinking, and that's precisely the problem.

We live in a culture where the definition of the "real parents" is in flux. It's traditionally understood that real parents are the people who you look like, and it takes a certain amount of work to undo that conditioning. In the meantime, insensitive comments like these make DE parents a tad upset.

For example, donor egg moms really, really, really don't like when egg donors are referred to as mothers of any sort, and phrases like "genetic mothers" can send folks into a tizzy. What they're reacting to makes sense, mind you. It's threatening to feel disconnected from your DE child (which is bound to happen because parent-child relationships are nuanced), and it's threatening to have your bond with your DE child devalued by people around you (which is bound to happen because people are idiots). In context, these moms' reactions are completely and entirely appropriate.
What I struggle with is that DE moms defend their legitimacy by saying things like "I carried him," "I gave birth to him," and other assertions of biological involvement. I get what they mean, but this argument makes me uncomfortable because it implies that mothers who didn't give birth to their children aren't as worthy of the "mom" title and - the inverse - that birthmothers and surrogates are. All of which is to say that I think pregnancy a flawed defense of motherhood, and my opinion is that we shouldn't use it.

As a community, our tact should be different. It's simply a matter of reinforcing what we know to be true: real parents are the parents who raise the children.

This approach is particularly important when we consider that we're a part of a broader community of women, men, and couples who've turned to donor eggs, donor sperm, surrogates, and adoption to help us complete our homes. Defining parenthood is a collective concern, and we should do it in a way that is as inclusive as possible of these diverse family make-ups.

Personally, (as I've mentioned before) I don't feel threatened by having my donor referred to as the genetic mother. She is the genetic mother, and I'm the biological mother. That's the situation, and I'm not afraid to name it.

The problem would be if you say anything about her being the real mother, at which point I'm also not afraid to mother-fuck you up.

Bio. Genetics.

After searching, downloading, and listening to every single NPR segment about egg and sperm donation they had, something occurred to me:

Women who use DS to conceive call their donors biological fathers.
Women who use DE to conceive never call their donors biological mothers. Ever.

This made me think about the words "biology," "genetics," and "biogenetics" and how this language reflects the reproductive roles of women and men.

To review how men make babies: they have sex (biology) and deposit sperm inside the woman (genetics). That's it. Their entire biogenetic function is tied to a single act that takes a few minutes. (Yes, boys, I said a few minutes).

For women, it's different. Women make babies through ovulation (genetic) but also through 9 months of gestation, 12-24 hours of labor, and another year of nursing (biology). So unlike men where the biogenetic experience is singular, women can actually separate out those two parts so that there are unique biological and genetic experiences in the baby-making process.

The implications of reproductive function on the language is the following (yes, it's another chart).



Again, I just make this shit up as I go along, but I think it sounds good.

Even though I'm convinced of these words' proper usages, I've caught myself mixing them up; I sometimes say that my kid won't be biologically mine when what I mean is genetic. I know why I slip up: it's because this whole thing is some crazy sci-fi shit, and it's not easy to wrap my head around.

The silver lining, though, is that it'll be confusing for others, and I'll get to mess with them by introducing conversations about the linguistic implications of reproductive technologies and their effects on popular understandings of biogenetics.

That'll be fun.