Egg donors > Eggs are eggs

What if I feel as though there is a child of mine somewhere?

It’s possible that some people might think that at first, but don’t forget that a child is a unique complex individual made up from four very different contributions to its development to become a person in its own right. Two elements are its genetic inheritance, and the others are the parental influences and the environment in which they grow. You are contributing to only one of those for any child and, as a consequence, he or she will be very different from you and your own children if you have them and will not, in any meaningful sense, be yours.

There are strong arguments which suggest that the environment in which the child grows has a stronger influence over the person they will become than the genes. You are thinking about egg donation to help a couple have a child, and this genetic link is nothing like the same link that is forged by the mother-child bond. This is how one of our donors viewed it:

“I very much think about it in terms of when I donated my eggs, I was not at a point in my life where I was trying to get pregnant,” she says. “All I was giving away was the potential of a child and I’d have just had a period – I don’t feel any connection at all to those eggs.”

It’s a bit like the idea of creating a garden from a packet of seeds. They are just seeds until they are planted in soil, watered, given sun, tended and only after time and nurturing might they flower and become a garden. The seeds may contain the genetic blueprint for the flowers, but it is the gardener and the environment that really create the final garden.