Two five-inch syringes with bright orange caps have been placed atop the white linen of the grand banquet table, like little sterile centerpieces. The table sits in an elegant meeting room – arched floor-to-ceiling windows, rich floral carpet – on the second floor of a posh downtown Portland, Oregon hotel.

Although I pretend not to notice, I can’t stop staring at the needles, and neither can the three women seated to my left. The four of us have never met, but I know we have more in common than aichmophobia. We’re all height-and-weight proportionate, cancer-free, non-smoking, college-educated twenty-somethings.

And we’re considering donating our eggs.

“It could take months before a couple chooses you, but once you accept, the donation process takes as little as six weeks,” says Catherine, the donor agency representative, a woman who looks as though she could be a plus-size model, hefty but curvy with intense dark eyes and a flashy smile.

She invites us to open to the sample calendar inside the information packets, which have been set before us as though they are the main course.

Week One: donor matched with couple.

Week Two: psychological evaluation and legal consultation.

Week Three: physical assessment and genetic testing.

Weeks Four and Five: fifteen days of hormone injections.

Week Six: egg retrieval and $6,000 payment.

As we listen to the details, nobody squirms at the mention of the physical concerns:  cramping, weight gain and mood swings associated with the hormones, the risk of ovarian hyperstimulation, which can require hospitalization and has in rare cases lead to death.  Nor do we react to the news that we could face a lawsuit if we back out mid-process.  We don’t even flinch when Catherine assures us, with a practiced smoothness, “There’s nothing that links egg donation to infertility.”

Only the syringes make us shudder. Our decades of experience with needles – all those vaccines and tetanus shots as kids – have told us how to feel about them: scared. But egg harvesting?  None of us has been through that before, so we’re not sure how to act.

While explaining the twice-daily injection regime, Catherine passes around the syringes. I uncap one and inspect it; it looks as thin and fragile as mechanical pencil lead. But the second one, the intramuscular, reminds me of a fat sewing machine needle that can plunge through denim. My hands sweat.

“Don’t worry, the big one is used only once. It’s the final shot, the ‘trigger shot,’ which prepares the ovaries for retrieval,” Catherine says. “By then you’re used to giving yourself the injections. Donors tell me it’s no big deal.”

I want to believe her. The entire process doesn’t sound dreadful; it actually seems simple and straightforward. But a refrain keeps playing in the back of my mind, asking, “Could it be that easy? Can I actually do this?”

As I muse, I realize I’m staring at a sleeping baby—bald, button-nosed and eyebrow-less—resting in glossy Technicolor on the cover of the donor information packet. The coral-colored infant has a generic look, like it could be a photo of me as a newborn.

When I was born 27 years ago, the option to become pregnant through another woman’s eggs didn’t exist. The first pregnancy accomplished with a donated egg occurred in 1984 in Australia and was considered at the time to be a break-through childbearing option for women either born without ovaries or whose ovaries had failed because of early menopause, radiation or chemotherapy.

In the decades since, egg donation has spurred much controversy as people saw using donor eggs as a way to prevent passing on undesirable traits as serious as genetically transferable diseases and as superficial as male pattern baldness. But, ethical questions aside, egg donation has become a proven method for prolonging a woman’s childbearing years far beyond the norm. A woman at age 41 has a 17 percent success rate getting pregnant with her own eggs, compared with a 50 percent success rate using eggs donated by a younger woman. (In December a woman in Spain used donated eggs from California to become, at age 67, the oldest recorded woman to give birth.) In the 90s the average egg recipient was in her thirties. Now she’s 42 ½. The use of donor eggs has tripled in the last decade.  More than 15,000 donor eggs were used in U.S. in vitro fertilization procedures in 2004, the most recent year of data available.

Today U.S. egg donation is an estimated $38-million-a-year, largely unregulated industry. In many countries, including Canada, Britain and France, it’s illegal to pay donors for eggs. That’s the rule here as well, but donors are allowed compensation for personal effort, time and expense. Between $5,000 and $10,000 has been deemed ethically appropriate by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. But no limit is enforced. In some cases, infertile couples negotiate directly with young women who have been known to charge upward of $20,000 for each time they donate.

In most cases, infertile couples find donors through three main routes: by asking relatives or friends who may donate for free; by posting personal advertisements online or in college campus newspapers offering as much as $50,000 to the right young woman; by working with an egg donation agency, which acts almost like a dating service, recruiting candidates and posting nameless profiles for couples to peruse, helping them find the right match.

That’s how I became interested in donating, through a recruitment advertisement that read, “Women: Help In Medical Infertility/Ovum Donation! Make $5,000-$10,000.” I saw it last August as I searched an online job bank for work in Eugene, Oregon. I was starting grad school there in a month and was looking for a way to cover my living expenses while in school. After scrolling through screens of $8-an-hour home health aide ads, the five-figure ad grabbed my attention.

Like me, most who consider donating list the money as what first attracts them. College-age women make up more than 75 percent of U.S. donors, and selling eggs is often seen as a quick way to make substantial cash. One recent survey found donors were most likely to use money to pay for school loans and expenses, followed by savings, credit card debt and house and car payments.

I didn’t call the number in the ad in August, but, after the first few months of school that fall, I ran out of money, couldn’t pay my portion of the rent and was falling behind on my credit card bills. I figured I needed between $5,000 and $6,000 to get through the year. Hating the idea of being deeper in debt through school loans, I thought donating my eggs might be the answer.

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