Diana Thomas knows from personal experience how hard it can be to get pregnant. So she found a way to make it easier — and women over 40 are reaping the benefits.
The Donor Egg Choice
In a Lexington, Kentucky, fertility clinic, in a lab not much bigger than a walk-in closet, 300 eggs sit in liquid nitrogen, waiting to be chosen for fertilization. They belong to, among others, 19-year-old Victoria, a brown-eyed college student whose special talents include lacrosse and tennis; Kymberly, a 24-year-old Korean-American with a passion for hunting; and Priyanka, a 27-year-old Indian who speaks fluent Hindi. Plucked from the ovaries of healthy women under age 30, the eggs will almost certainly find their way into the uterus of a woman over 40.
And Diana Thomas's company may well be making the match. In the next two years, her agency hopes to corner 10 percent of the egg donor market in the United States. Thomas, 52, started X and Y Consulting in 1996 to provide her clients -- 99 percent of whom are over 40 -- with viable eggs; eight years later, she launched a division, Cryo Eggs International (CEI), to offer women the option of using the latest frozen-egg technology. For Thomas's clients, having the choice -- and the chance -- to become pregnant with a donor egg is the ultimate gift. But it comes with a price tag: The company's clients typically pay from $25,000 to $40,000 for each pregnancy attempt that uses fresh eggs. The fee covers donor recruiting, compensation, and insurance; screening tests (donors have to take genetic and psychological exams); and transportation. The services of CEI, whose technology eliminates the donor's need to travel, cost less: from $15,000 to $18,000 per attempt.
By age 40, the probability of getting pregnant with your own eggs is about 10 percent. By that time the eggs that remain often have abnormal chromosomes, and the embryos that do form end in miscarriage more than half the time. Although birthrates for women ages 40 to 44 increased by 62 percent from 1990 to 2004, the rise is linked mostly to advances in technology and the advent of many fertility-enhancing therapies. "Beyond 45, it's rare to get pregnant. We're talking almost lottery odds," says Jamie Akin, MD, medical director of the Bluegrass Fertility Center and of CEI. "The Hollywood actresses who become pregnant in their mid-forties have almost certainly done it with donor eggs."
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