How Canada’s fertility laws are failing donors, doctors, and parents
by Alison Motluk
Illustration by Emily L. Eibel
In the spring of 2006, Heather Cox got an unexpected phone call from a Toronto fertility clinic. Three years earlier, she had donated eggs anonymously to a gay couple through the clinic. Now the same couple wanted a full sibling for their child. Would she consider providing eggs again?
She hesitated. Her first experience had been extremely unpleasant. A few days after the eggs were retrieved, her abdomen had filled with fluid. “I looked nine months pregnant,” she says. After fainting in the shower, she called the clinic, and they advised her to come back in to have the fluid drained. She did, but it took a full week before she felt better.
The clinic, CReATe Fertility Centre, called her during her recovery. They wanted to know if she had a telephone number for her cousin, who had also been a donor, and whom they wanted to ask to donate again. Cox couldn’t help them. “Well, would you be interested in donating again?” she recalls them asking. She said no.
This latest request, however, felt different. There was a child out there who had resulted from her egg, and she alone could help that child have a full genetic brother or sister. “I sympathized,” she says. “I only have one full-blooded sibling.” She agreed to do it, but with conditions: the eggs were to be used only by this one couple, and the clinic was to take extra care so she didn’t end up producing so many eggs that she got sick again. She also made it clear that this would be her last time donating…