‘IT’S JUST LIKE GIVING BLOOD’
‘Youcando eggdonation totakesome money’
THE nervous smiles of the couples and single women at the IVF clinic belie their heartbreaking struggle to have children.
It is open day at the Herts & Essex Fertility Centre, and half a dozen smiling nurses in blue uniforms are offering advice to anxious prospective patients.
On one wall there is a huge collage of at least 50 pictures of newborn babies in pastel romper suits and tiny white bonnets.
There is also a floor-to- ceiling poster of a happy couple holding a baby. ‘No NHS funding for your fertility treatment? There is another way!’ it states in huge letters. ‘Our Egg Share Programme provides completely free IVF.’
The deal seems too good to be true. Desperate couples can often spend tens of thousands of pounds on IVF, bankrupting themselves, begging, borrowing and stealing to pay for a shot at parenthood.
But there is a catch. In return for free treatment, women have to donate half of any healthy eggs they produce to the clinic.
The donated eggs can then be used to treat another couple – who pay as much as £7,500 per cycle.
And, of course, these eggs may result in babies – genetically the children of the egg donor, but brought up by another family.
One of the nurses attempts to make a sale. ‘You just think of them as cells,’ she says, while serving apple juice, cupcakes and fon- dant fancies. ‘I always think it’s like donating blood, isn’t it?
‘An egg isn’t a baby. Once it clicks, most people don’t have an issue with it. It just needs to click.’
The nurse is speaking to an undercover reporter from the Mail Investigations Unit.
Two reporters have spent the past two months posing as a couple to visit clinics that offer such egg-sharing deals.
While these arrangements are legal, staff must ensure prospective donors genuinely want to give their eggs away to other couples for altruistic reasons – not just because they are tempted by free or subsidised treatment they could otherwise not afford.
IVF clinics are banned from paying egg donors outright but can offer up to £750 in compensation to make sure they are not left out of pocket. The Herts & Essex clinic advertises for egg-sharers on Twitter, using the hashtag ‘#FreeIVF’.
One senior nurse says: ‘Most women find it OK because it’s not like your baby. It’s not fertilised. It grows in somebody else’s tummy.’
Egg- sharers at the clinic have one hour of counselling about the implications of other couples raising their genetic children.
But the nurse says this is ‘not a pass or fail thing’ and is ‘quite routine’. ‘Most people of course do it for the money,’ she adds.
A week later, the Mail’s reporters visit another fertility centre, the London Women’s Clinic in Darlington, County Durham, one of the most deprived towns in the UK.
Couples holding hands in a waiting room are called to the office of IVF consultant Dr Safwat Ashour.
Inside, there is a picture of a toddler on his computer screen, which is turned to face the patients.
‘We have plenty, plenty of people for egg-sharing,’ says Dr Ashour.
‘It is expensive for you, for me, for anybody, to do the IVF. So if you have an option which can reduce this, everybody will do it.’ He says ‘everybody’ on egg- sharing programmes ‘with very few exceptions’ donates for financial reasons.
When asked by the undercover reporters if this matters, Dr Ashour interjects: ‘You shouldn’t put this in writing. We know people donate for [a] few reasons but if you make it clear that it is for financial reasons, you will not be accepted, simply because it is not allowed in this country to donate because you’re getting money.’
He is clear that donating eggs can have serious consequences, including the donor not getting pregnant while the recipient has a baby with one of the shared eggs.
He outlines how any resulting child has a legal right to find out the identity of its biological parents at 18. ‘If you have a concern, don’t do it,’ he adds.
But Dr Ashour admits the counselling at his clinic is inadequate. Egg- sharers are only required to have one appointment, which can be just half an hour, he says.
One egg recipient became pregnant but could not cope with the idea of carrying another woman’s child – so she had an abortion. ‘She was not well prepared,’ Dr Ashour says. ‘We did not counsel her properly. This is our fault.’
Asked why the clinic offers eggsharing, he says: ‘Don’t you know the eggs are going to bring to us over £6,000 from another person?
‘Without your eggs we wouldn’t be able to treat her at all. So we are making good profit.’
While some clinics source eggs through egg- sharing schemes, other rely on altruistic women who donate because they want to help couples who cannot conceive.
The industry watchdog, the Human Embryology and Fertility Authority (HFEA), outlines how the law means ‘the UK has a responsibility to ensure that donation is voluntary and unpaid, donors act from altruistic motives and donation is in the spirit of contributing to a wider social good’.
The regulator adds: ‘The essence of donation is the act of giving.’
But this appears at odds with the attitude of consultant Dr Melina Stasinou at Create Fertility in central London. On a Tuesday evening, she is seeing dozens of prospective patients. Demand is such that women have to wait two hours for a private appointment. The Mail’s female reporter asks her whether she can share her eggs for free or discounted IVF treatment.
The glamorous Greek explains that the clinic does not offer egg-
‘You shouldn’t put this in writing’
sharing. But she does have an alternative suggestion – the reporter could be an ‘altruistic’ egg donor and give eggs to the clinic. She could then be paid compensation and put it to towards her own IVF.
‘If you want to do something, you can do an egg donation for example,’ says Dr Stasinou. ‘So to take some money, OK, from this process and then to do your own cycle as well.
‘You can do this thing. So to save some money.’
Asked if this is something many women do, she replies: ‘It’s not common but you can do it if you want. It’s not something that put you in danger. It’s just for financial reasons.’ Trying to reassure the reporter that donation also benefits the egg recipient, she adds: ‘You do it with good purposes in both times, one for your own fertility, one is for other women who cannot use their own eggs. So it’s both advantages.’
Last night, an HFEA spokesman said: ‘This investigation highlights potential breaches of our code. If we find that a clinic is in breach of our code, we will take regulatory action.’
Herts & Essex Fertility Centre denied influencing patients unduly to donate eggs. It said they must see independent counsellors before donating eggs and that the number of sessions was decided by patients and the counsellors.
The clinic’s consultant gynaecologist David Ogutu added: ‘We are proud to help hundreds of couples have babies who cannot afford fertility treatment and are not eligible for NHS treatment. Only through egg-sharing can some couples have a loving family. We are equally helping hundreds of women who need donor eggs.’
London Women’s Clinic North East said it treated ten eggsharers in 2016 and none so far this year, and offered counselling in line with HFEA rules.
It said the counselling ‘prioritises the welfare of the patient and that of any existing or future child’. The clinic said egg-sharing was an ‘established and successful technique’ that had benefited thousands of couples and ‘is underpinned by the mutual acts of giving’.
A spokesman added: ‘Studies show the main motivation of egg donors is altruism, not money. The quotes attributed to LWC staff do not represent the reality or spirit of the guidance available to patients.’
Create Fertility said its eggdonation procedure fully complied with HFEA rules, and it always made it clear that donors must not give solely for financial reasons. It said the reporter’s conversation was a brief and informal chat, whereas patients who sign up face full consultations, medical tests and independent counselling.
It said it was not illegal or improper to talk about egg donation, only to accept an egg donor for money beyond the compensation allowed. If there was a suspicion that a woman had unacceptable underlying motivations, she would be refused treatment, it added.
‘Theeggsbringus£6,000. We are making good profit’ ‘We will take regulatory action’