Back on the pill

When I was fifteen and things got serious with my first boyfriend, a sullen, broad-shouldered boy who I met at summer swim team practice, I asked my mom for birth control. I privately agonized over it for weeks, and finally told her that I wasn’t having sex but thought someday soon I might want to have sex since I had a really serious boyfriend and we were taking things slow but still wouldn’t it be a good idea to plan ahead?

I remember the momentary expression of incredulous horror that crossed her face before she collected herself. She warned me about all the health risks of taking birth control at such a young age (of which there are actually zero) and told me that it might affect my fertility down the road (also not a true thing). I persevered, though, adolescent reproductive warrior that I was, and we went to the gynecologist, and I got my birth control pills.

About a year later, it became abundantly clear that the boyfriend was sort of clingy and annoying and we were never going to have sex. I dejectedly told my mom not to refill the prescription.

Now, a good six years after I quit the pill and subsequently realized that I liked sleeping with women better than men, I’m back on the bandwagon. I’m not suffering from unbearable periods. I’m not newly sexually active with people who have semen. I’m donating my eggs.

Just as I had before I nervously asked for birth control so many years ago, I thought long and hard about the decision to donate eggs. It began with an anthropology class about kinship and reproductive technology, which quickly engendered an inexplicable fascination with the concept of gamete donation and the cultural implications of the practice, which soon developed into a full-blown preoccupation with all things baby-making: fertility treatments, adoption, surrogacy, egg and sperm donation, in vitro fertilization, birth, pregnancy, doulas, midwifery. My friends and I watched The Business of Being Born on more than one Saturday night. I got trained as a post-partum doula. I bought The Baby Book and nestled it among my textbooks.

At first, donating eggs seemed like a neat experiment and a sweet way to pay for graduate school. But I soon realized that being an egg donor would mean much more — it would be my way of paying it forward. As a queer person, if I ever decide that it’s important to me to have kids that are biologically related to me or my partner, I’ll need lots of help — from doctors, nurses, midwives, donors, friends, and family, not to mention a community of folks who accept, support, and empower queer families. By donating eggs, I would make my small act of resistance against a world that excludes and shames families who don’t fit the mold of a heteronormative, two-parent, DNA-sharing norm.

It’s been almost six months since my initial consultation with the egg donor program coordinator. They program emailed me a few days ago to let me know that I had officially matched with a family and I would begin taking birth control on the third day of my period. (I’ll be on birth control for a couple of months to sync up my cycle with the surrogate, then I’ll begin injecting the hard core fertility juice.) The next day WAS the third day of my period, so I asked that the fertility pharmacy deliver the prescription as soon as possible.

It came today, sealed in an express FedEx box with several pages of tiny, unhelpful instructions and disclaimers. The top page said this: “We know that this part of your fertility journey can be overwhelming.”

That misplaced sentiment sort of sums up my whole experience of egg donation so far. I’ve pored over my family history on ancestry.com, surveyed my relatives for medical histories, and found out about serious genetic mutations that I carry. I’ve undergone a pelvic exam and fertility evaluation and learned the precise number of follicles that my ovaries had produced on that day. I’ve begun my fertility journey.

I feel totally comfortable and confident with the choice I’ve made to donate my eggs, for reasons I’ve thought carefully about for a long time, but there are moments that I feel deeply confused and uneasy. Why am I doing this? Why am I taking myself on this “journey” when, actually, this fertility journey is not mine?

It’s bizarre to be 23 and not straight and suddenly bombarded with detailed information about your fertility. It’s bizarre to be taking birth control as someone with no current interest in having kids and literally a zero percent chance of ever getting accidentally pregnant.

I got home late tonight because I babysat after work, for a two-year-old the size of a four-year-old who has recently discovered the trick of sticking out her tongue and blowing spit in people’s faces. On a scale of one to wanting kids, I was at rock bottom.

The FedEx package was on my kitchen table, brought inside by a roommate, and inside I found two packs of birth control, little red and white pills neatly suspended in their little air bubbles, with a blue satin sleeve to keep them in.

I suddenly felt acutely aware of my body, my belly, my ovaries and uterus, the faint bloatedness and cramping of my now-subsiding period. My father’s mistrust of Western medicine and my mother’s crippling fear of side effects had taught me to be wary of putting anything foreign into my body. I wondered what the pill might do to me. Would my periods get heavier? Lighter? Would there be spotting? Would I be grumpy? Would I gain weight?

Like everything else, I would have to be comfortable with not knowing what would happen. I can’t know how I’ll feel when these parents have their baby. I can’t know how this flimsy pack of red pills is going to affect my body. I don’t know how I’ll feel in a year or five or twenty.

The birth control is temporary. The packs will run out and I’ll graduate to needles and serious hormones, which will first suppress egg maturation and then hyper-stimulate the process to maximize the number of follicles that can be retrieved. Then, in a ten-minute procedure, the donated eggs will be retrieved. I might even be able to to go work that afternoon. Soon after, my body will rinse itself of the residue of the egg donation process. And some very happy and relieved people will have their family.