They used her eggs to have a baby. Now they’re one big family
Nurses hush her to be quiet. Women in the surrounding beds haven’t been as fortunate as she is, but Brooke Sodahl, 22, is fresh out of the operating room and has someone she needs to call. “They got 26 eggs!” she whispers over the line.
Rachel Grashow, 34, is on the other end, getting ready for work in her Boston apartment. The whole world lights up as she hears the words. For the first time in years – after five deaths in the family and a cataclysmic reckoning with her own infertility that included a miscarriage and four failed rounds of IVF – she feels her luck turning. Her family is about to grow, and Sodahl, a stranger she met on the internet few months ago, is the reason: she is their egg donor.
When Grashow hangs up the phone, returning to her day job at Harvard doesn’t seem like an option. She calls out from work, and heads to the place where she knows she is most needed. An hour later, she climbs into the elevator at the Boxer hotel, juggling three cups of soup up to Sodahl’s hotel room to find her laid up on the bed, stomach cramping, unable to relax.
Earlier that week, Sodahl had flown up to Boston to begin the surgical procedure to remove her eggs. While she was there, Grashow and her husband, Ken Walton, invited their donor out to dinner to get to know her, and were surprised by their mutual connection. But it was this afternoon in 2013 when soup, a back rub and a couple of movies turned a contractual obligation into an unconventional sisterhood.
•••
It is rare for families to meet the stranger donating eggs to them. In the US, egg and sperm donation is usually a closed process: the family hears about the donor through an agency, receiving only basic, non-identifying features about them – such as their university or their eye color – but never learning a name or hearing their voice.
The donor is also often blind to the family. Most will go through testing (and in the case of egg donation, hormone injections to procure 20 or more eggs over the period of half a year), never knowing whether a donation was successful, who the family is, or what the hopeful offspring will look like.
But Grashow and Sodahl met through an increasingly accepted process called “known donation”. Here, egg and sperm donors can meet prospective parents face-to-face (or computer screen to computer screen) to build a relationship before converging on the process of creating a new life together. The relationship from then on can be as open or closed as desired.
Experts say this model provides less pain and confusion for donors, parents and children – but most people still opt for closed donations: they don’t want to involve strangers in their lives; they are often influenced by the cultural pressure to appear “normal”; or they fear having to reveal a painful infertility diagnosis to their friends and neighbors.
Grashow says the benefits of going through a known donation are obvious to her now. Since that long afternoon at the Boxer, she and Sodahl have shared a sister-like relationship, building a family together that sprawls across the country.
The connection is symbiotic and, at first glance, effortless. Sodahl is in their lives and the children aren’t in the dark: there’s no mystery surrounding their ancestry, their genetic predispositions to certain illnesses, or how they came to be in this world.
Not all donations go as well as this. •••
It wasn’t until their 27-year-old son Steven died in 2020 that Laura and David Gunner found out what they wish they had known about his sperm donor. Gunner vividly remembers the moment she, her husband and their male ob-gyn sat around a table in 1992 to discuss how anonymity would be best for the child.
“I was the lady in the room sitting at the kid’s table. It was just not a good experience,” said Gunner via phone.
Gunner remembers the doctor’s throwaway warning: that if the couple didn’t choose an anonymous donation the donor might spring up years later, demanding custody.
The possibility terrified her, as there were few explicit protections for parents or donors when it came to thirdparty fertility back in 1992. (The ChildParent Security Act in New York, which went into effect February 2021, now offers intended parents full legal custody in egg or sperm donations, removing any parental rights of the donor.)
They had no reason to doubt the information in donor 1558’s medical report, which portrayed him as a healthy, young ice hockey player. But a year after Steven died, through connections on the Donor Sibling Registry and a 23andMe test, the Gunners found a grandmother of donor 1558, who shared details of Steven’s sperm donor with them.
Just like Steven, donor 1558 was tall with a tight smile, a fair complexion and wore glasses. And just like Steven, he had died of an opioid overdose after a long struggle with schizophrenia.
“I can’t even describe the shock,” said Laura Gunner. “They were parallel in presentation of mental illness, their diagnosis, their decompensation. I couldn’t understand how this happened.”
The Gunners, devastated, reached out directly to the Virginia-based agency that supplied the sperm, asking them to notify other families who had used the donor’s sperm. The agency refused and asked for medical proof of not just Steven’s condition, but also the donor’s – which the Gunners didn’t have. The agency hadn’t verified the donor’s medical information themselves, but now wanted the Gunners, who never knew him, to do so. It felt hypocritical.
“He was incentivized to lie. I was not,” Gunner said by text message.
The FDA now requires donors to get a physical examination and to take blood and urine samples for infectious diseases and STDs.
The group that oversees egg and sperm donation, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, stipulates that donors with a history of serious mental illness should be excluded from donating, but little is done to enforce this. Usually, donors are required to fill out a physical and mental health survey during health screenings, but none of the information provided is required to be or verified. So while donor 1558’s condition violated ASMR’s guidelines, there were no consequences.
In other instances of organ donation, such as kidney transplants, donors are legally required to go through extensive assessments and medical history reviews.
“This feels ridiculous,” Gunner said, “but I did not fully understand that the donor was my son’s biological father. It was presented almost that the donor was this abstract person with an altruistic nature that was helping us. It wasn’t presented to us to consider that this was a person.”
In 2021, the Gunners contacted their friend and local representative, New York state senator Patrick Gallivan, to address what they saw as a gap in the donation industry: how could families go through a whole donation and conceive children without ever knowing if what the donors reported about themselves was true?
Together they drafted two bills which are in committee in the New York state senate. If passed, the legislation would require medical, educational and felony history of any prospective donor in New York before donation.
“I just can’t think that there won’t be
support after they hear a story like this. Think of what’s at stake here – a human life!” Gallivan said by phone in March.
The couple also inspired a new bill in the House of Representatives, introduced last week by Representative Chris Jacobs. The new bill, called “Steven’s Law”, would require potential sperm donors to disclose their medical records to intended parents.
But despite the Gunners’ tireless efforts to change the system, they feel little resolve.
“I go over that moment a million times, with the doctor and my husband at the side of me, and I try to rewrite history to ask the questions that need to be asked,” Gunner said.
“And then I think, ‘How was that my responsibility? How were those my questions to ask?’”
•••
When I ring the bell at Sodahl’s house, nestled in the Las Vegas red rock mountains, it’s Grashow who greets me warmly at the door. She offers endless snacks, chuckling as she acknowledges this isn’t exactly her home. Sodahl is upstairs with Grashow’s girls, Nika, eight, and Tessa, six, braiding their hair.
Soon, the girls descend into the kitchen giggling and run straight to Grashow to show off their new locks. Although they share Sodahl’s button nose and her wide smile, it’s their mannerisms that organically liken them to Grashow. Nika is sharp and inquisitive, cerebral like her mother, while Tessa clings to her heels.
A couple years earlier, Grashow’s oldest daughter, Nika, approached her wondering: is Sodahl her mom? As she grew, more resemblances between her appearance and Sodahl’s transpired and with them, a curiosity that was heightened by her penchant for light provocation.
“I don’t think she was trying to hurt me but she was probing. I told her, ‘I am definitely your mom,’” Grashow said. That seemed to be enough for Nika, and the topic hasn’t resurfaced.
“I think the girls know intrinsically that we’re their parents,” says Walton, their father. “From the moment we thought they’d even remotely understand, we started trying to explain where they came from. We’d use a puzzle piece analogy: sometimes you only need two puzzle pieces, but we needed an extra piece from Auntie Brookie.”
It wasn’t always this easy: when Grashow brought her daughter to first meet Sodahl seven years ago, she feared the worst: that Sodahl and Nika would feel an immediate innate connection facilitated by their biology, usurping Grashow’s maternal bond with her children.
But that didn’t happen. When Sodahl saw Nika, she looked at her with curious eyes: a Where’s Waldo hunt for the similarities. It was a fun peek into her own future, if she were to have kids, but Sodahl never felt any inclination that Nika was hers. She simply did not want to be a mother yet. Helping Grashow start her own family was exactly what she wanted: the possibility to be a cool aunt figure without any of the responsibility.
Now the broadened families see each other twice a year, in Las Vegas at Brooke’s home and on vacation together at Cape Cod in Massachusetts, near Grashow and Walton’s home. They call each other regularly. When Nika had a recent surgery, Sodahl’s parents mailed presents and a care package. And through time and close connection, Grashow’s insecurities have eased.
“Nobody understands it until they actually see it,” Walton says. “My family are dumbfounded. They don’t know what it’s like choosing family.”
“We did this weird thing,” Grashow begins, laughing.
“And now it’s even weirder!,” Sodahl chimes in, finishing her sentence.
“I think if Brooke had been anonymous, I would have used my imagination to fill in all the pieces in whatever way would have been convenient for me,” said Grashow over the phone another evening. “That maybe if the girls were jerks, maybe I had chosen a sociopath.”
•••
The fear over who the “real” parent is remains the leading reason why many prospective parents and donor organizations avoid open donations. That fear was crystalized in 1991, when Robin Young and Sandy Russo were sued for paternity by their sperm donor, Tom Steel.
Steel, who was initially introduced to the young lesbian couple through a mutual friend, wanted to change the terms of their parental arrangement when he was diagnosed with HIV in the early 1990s, when the disease was a death sentence. He wanted more time with the child born of his donation, despite originally agreeing not to be involved.
The US legal system didn’t recognize Young and Russo’s same-sex partnership as legitimate, and in 1994, the appellate division of the New York state supreme court recognized Steel as the legal paternal figure in the child’s life.
The four-year court battle was a landmark case in the third-party fertility industry, with lingering impacts on the rights of donors and parents alike (the saga was chronicled in the HBO Max series Nuclear Family, directed by Ry Russo-Young, the offspring of Young and Steel, now an acclaimed film-maker.)
But sperm donation is a drastically simpler process than egg donation, a multi-month procedure that requires hormone injections and surgery, and has more legal guardrails than the newer industry of egg donation.
Legal experts in the world of women’s reproductive rights say that few protections have been drafted specifically with female donors in mind. Some of the legislative decisions that apply to the realm of egg donation are hand-me-downs from surrogacy cases, litigated to protect the parental rights of the intended parents, not intending to provide safety or security to those donating.
In New York, state senator Liz Krueger proposed a bill in February 2020 that would curtail the health risks taken on by would-be surrogates and egg donors and sought to provide an avenue for tri-parent families to legally exist (there is currently no legal framework for multi-parent family structures). It also proposed a donor registry, but critics argued the plan was flawed because participation in the registry would have been entirely voluntary. It was shot down in favor of the ChildParent Security Act, another surrogacy bill with few explicit protections for donors.
Most egg donors want open donations: in October 2021, a study of 271 donors found nearly two-thirds (63%) of interviewed egg donors preferred their donations be known as opposed to anonymous; 88% were in favor of a donor registry; and 45% felt that such a registry should be mandatory.
But industry leaders argue fewer people will donate their eggs if they’re expected to maintain an open, potentially lifelong connection with the family and fear that the responsibility of keeping and verifying health records would increase the cost of an already expensive procedure.
“In most cases, you’re going to take a treatment that’s already difficult to access because of cost and put that [new financial] burden on the patients,” said Sean Tipton, the chief advocacy and policy officer of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
In 2012, ASRM successfully lobbied against and ultimately blocked legislation in New York that would increase transparency and create a donor registry.
Tipton warns against the involvement of the government in the industry, arguing that a central registry poses risks when “non-magnanimous politicians” seek to draft policy around reproductive rights, as in as the national abortion rights crisis.
“We are very committed to giving patients the autonomy to make their own decisions about their reproductive lives,” said Tipton. “There would be many advantages to [a donor registry] in the industry, but we have not seen a proposal that solves the rather formidable obstacles, which include privacy [for donors and families].”
•••
Now that Sodahl has children, she appreciates the emotional turmoil that parents must go through when deciding to use a donor. She remembers the false expectations of an instant connection after giving birth, which was at odds with her own experience. She could only imagine how conceiving children with the help of a donor would enhance any impostor syndrome around the already fragile experience of early motherhood.
But she and Grashow can’t imagine a donation any other way. Grashow agrees that families have a right to know accurate information about donors, butshe feels there’s a larger lie perpetuated by agencies.
“There’s this illusion of health and control that people don’t think about when they’re conceiving naturally,” Grashow says. “A myth that you can control biology and pick the perfect donor to have the perfect kid.”
No matter how much parents invest upfront in the process, there’s no guarantee the child will look or be like them, that they won’t get sick, or that they’ll live a happy life.
Still, Grashow feels she has an advantage by knowing Sodahl – a glimpse into the future she wouldn’t have had if she chose not to. Together, their family feels complete.
Their experience might become more commonplace in the future, but it still won’t be the norm. In early June, Colorado became the first state in the nation to ban anonymous sperm and egg donation. When the law goes into effect in 2025, children born of future procedures will legally gain access to their donor’s identity and medical history. It will require agencies and clinics based in Colorado to keep current records on the health of their donors, which will create a de facto registry.
Only a dozen states have attempted to regulate the industry through the law. Six states (California, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) adopted the 2017 Uniform Parentage Act, which authorizes the release of donor identities once the child reaches age 18. Still, it permits donors to conceal their identities at the time of donation, so pro-disclosure activists don’t see the regulation as truly protective.
Meanwhile, the increasing popularity of genetic tests like 23andMe and MyHeritage effectively nullify any promises of anonymity in the donation process.
Recently, Sodahl and her husband, Jared, volunteered to serve as guardians to Nika and Tessa should anything happen to Grashow and Walton. Eight years ago, that offer would have been Grashow’s worst nightmare.
“It’s a weight off my chest that they offered,” said Grashow. “I think it’s what I always wanted. It was a huge gift to me.”
The girls are completely open with friends or strangers about the structure of their family. A month ago, Nika wrote an essay for her class where she described having “two moms and two dads”.
Their family might be different, but the girls aren’t confused at all. Nika ends her essay with one short sentence: “I love my big family.”