In 2001, Sindy Wei, a 25-year-old woman attending graduate school in California, decided to supplement her PhD stipend by exchanging her eggs for $6,500 (about $11,000 in 2025). Wei, who is now a radiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, figured that donating her eggs could earn her extra money and help someone else build their family. At the time, Wei was unaware of the long-term medical risks that come with the process of egg donation.
After her doctor surgically harvested close to 60 eggs from her ovaries—three times more than the typical retrieval of 20 oocytes (eggs)—Wei collapsed and nearly bled to death after the procedure nicked an artery. That donation nearly cost Wei her life. She was also left with unexplained infertility.
When Wei decided to start her own family, nearly a decade later, she needed intrauterine insemination before eventually giving birth to twins. Twenty-four years later, she still suffers bladder spasms from her emergency surgery.
Wei says that her postdonation infertility wasn’t captured in any patient database. The clinic didn’t maintain contact with her.
“If I had not spoken out, I don’t think most people would really know how these things could happen,” she says.
Wei’s experience isn’t unique. University of Alabama anthropologist Diane Tober says too many stories like Wei’s go unreported because donors are considered vendors, not patients, within the lucrative U.S. human egg market. Unlike in other nations, such as Spain, where a donor’s number of cycles and heritable conditions are tracked, no federal registry exists for U.S. egg donations.
“To go through a process like this and to not know that these are potential outcomes is the height of irresponsibility [on the industry’s part],” Tober says.
The Financial Incentives Behind Human Egg Donation
Nearly 13.4% of American women [PDF] struggle to conceive or carry a pregnancy to term. This reality coincides with women increasingly choosing to delay pregnancy [PDF] into their 30s and 40s. By the time women are ready to start their families, many discover their aging eggs prevent them from conceiving naturally. More prospective parents are turning to donor eggs to create their families, giving rise to a booming industry. In 2024, the U.S. donor egg market was valued at $400 million. That figure is forecast to rise to $520.5 million by 2030.
Commercial egg donation—in which agencies recruit, screen, and match healthy donors with prospective parents—optimizes the number of eggs retrieved per donor. A woman donating her eggs begins by taking birth control pills to regulate her menstrual cycle. Then she injects herself over 8 to 14 days with the follicle stimulating hormone along with leuprolide—a synthetic hormone that halts the donor’s natural hormone cascade—to stimulate her ovaries into releasing 20 or more eggs at a time. After that, doctors pierce the donor’s vaginal wall with an ultrasound-guided needle and collect the eggs from her swollen ovaries. Once the eggs are successfully retrieved, the donor is compensated and sent home. Apart from a follow-up phone call, a clinic typically does not contact the donor again.