Why we’re devoting an entire issue to the topic of Jewish egg donors.

by Michelle Cove

I remember when Lilith magazine devoted an entire issue to Jewish eggs back in 2001. I was 32 and just starting to date my now husband. I assumed all of my friends and I would easily get pregnant when we decided the time was right. So the whole topic of egg donation seemed slightly creepy and extremely futuristic. Now I’m 38, with a close friend who is on round two of the in vitro fertilization procedure, a stepsister who is pregnant with twins from IVF, and another friend who recently delivered beautiful healthy twins from the process. This topic, which seemed so removed from my life six years ago, now keeps popping up.

We 30-somethings are the generation to postpone marriage and babies longer than any other. We were told we could have it all, and many of us just assumed that meant having babies when we felt like it. We figured we would wait until after we established our careers and took the time to know who we really are—a message certainly encouraged by the Baby Boom women before us. We didn’t think about biology and ignored the fact that it becomes undeniably harder to have babies past age 35. Seeing pregnant photos of Madonna and Brooke Shields who were over age 35 aided the delusion. We didn’t know that many of these celebrities were paying thousands of dollars and pumping themselves full of hormones for those sweet round bellies.

It turns out that we Jewish women have been the ones to wait the longest to have our babies. According to the 2000 National Jewish Population Survey, more than half of 34-year-old Jewish women are childless, almost double the percentage of women overall. There has been a 5 percent drop in the American Jewish population in the last decade, from 5.5 million to 5.2 million. Jewish women today are having an average of 1.7 children, not enough to replenish the Jewish population going forward. Given that the very first commandment in the Bible is to “be fruitful and multiply,” this is a pretty big problem.

So one might ask: How could any Jews not be in favor of egg donation, given that it will lead to more Jewish babies?

Well, there are several complicated issues to work out. For those who believe that Jewish status is dependent on whether the individual’s mother is a Jew, what does that mean in the world of egg donation? If a Jewish woman gives birth with the aid of an egg donated by a non-Jewish woman, is the baby Jewish? Most rabbinic authorities agree that IVF and related techniques are acceptable when the husband’s sperm and wife’s eggs are used. What if it’s a gay couple, unmarried heterosexual couple, or single woman that wants a baby? All of these issues are becoming more prevalent and perplexing.

Here’s a conundrum: What if a Jewish woman donates an egg anonymously, the Jewish woman who is the recipient gives birth, and that child grows up and has a baby with someone else who originally came from the donor’s eggs? Hey, we’re not such a big population of people that this is totally far-fetched. Anyone who has played “Jewish Geography” knows how “small world” the Jewish community is.

We don’t have answers to all the complicated questions in this issue. What we do have are fascinating perspectives from all sides of the topic: a donor, a law expert, an organization that matches Jewish women with Jewish egg donors, and others.

Reading these articles will probably leave you, as it did me, with even more questions and concerns. What I do know is this: It was easy to think of egg donation as “slightly creepy” in the past. But once you’ve watched the fertility struggle of friends and relatives you care about, it becomes a lot easier to see egg donation as a source of great hope.

What do you think? Post your comment.