Wedding and funeral celebrant Laura Giddey, 37, has donated her eggs to five families.
It all started with an ad on Facebook.
That’s where Laura Giddey came across a couple looking for an egg donor to help them conceive a child.
The Auckland wedding and funeral celebrant had never considered donating her eggs before.
“At the time I had friends that were target="_self" rel="" title="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/kiwi-fitness-founder-on-infertility-heartache-and-search-for-a-surrogate/WHY2L3A5EZHSNN5YSJYW5M37LQ/">struggling to get pregnant, and they were a few years into the journey at that point,” Giddey, now 37, tells the Herald.
“I was thinking, if it came to it and I could help them in some way, then I would.”
Figuring there was no difference between helping friends and strangers in this way, Giddey decided to find out if she was eligible to donate.
“I did donate to that couple, but we didn’t end up getting a successful [embryo] transfer ... But once I’d done the first round and it hadn’t worked, which was obviously disappointing, I decided to try again.”
Her donation to a second couple was successful. In total, Giddey has donated her eggs to five families – the limit set by most New Zealand fertility clinics, due to our small population – all of whom welcomed baby boys as a result.
They were born in 2016, 2017, April 2018, July 2018 and 2019.
In order to donate her eggs, Giddey underwent health checks and counselling on her own and with the intended parents. Now married, she was single when she started donating – though if she’d had a partner at the time, they would have also had counselling.
Next, she would have hormone injections to boost her egg count for a couple of weeks before the extraction itself.
“I’m fine with needles, so the injections were fine. Sometimes there’s 20 or 25 follicles in there, so you can start to feel a little bit bloated by the end,” she says.
“Then you do a trigger injection, which is 24 hours before the extraction and that’s just getting everything ready to release.”
The procedure itself lasts less than an hour, after which there’s a brief recovery time. “Just a bit of cramping, a little bit like a period.”
Being self-employed, Giddey is thankful to have had the flexibility and time for the appointments and the surgery itself.
“It is a bit of a time commitment, because you’ve got to be able to do blood tests and check levels and stuff, and you have to be available for those couple of weeks – you wouldn’t be able to leave the city or anything,” she explains.
“But all of that stuff is covered and you’re not paying for anything.”
Contrary to what you might see on TV, in New Zealand egg and sperm donors are not paid – though they are in other countries. Here, Giddey explains, she could get reimbursement for taxis to and from hospital for egg extractions, and other treatment-related costs.
The likes of Australia and the US also don’t have a limit on the number of families you can donate eggs to, as a larger population lessens the chance of half-siblings forming relationships in the future.
Giddey says it is a “great feeling”, knowing she’s been able to give families a priceless gift.
“It also was just a small thing at the time. It’s only a couple of weeks of injections, it’s not carrying the babies,” she says.
“The emotional weight is so different for me because the parents are the ones that have been trying for years to have children, so the emotional pressure on them to have the pregnancy is huge. Obviously, I was disappointed if it didn’t work, but it was different for me – I could hold it a bit lightly.
“I think sometimes people put this expectation on egg donors, much more than they do on sperm donors. The idea is that I need to feel more emotionally attached to these children that are born, and I really don’t,” she explains.
“I feel really happy for them and their families, but they’re not my children. I’m not raising them, the parents are the ones that are raising them ... it’s just a different thing.”
Giddey describes herself as “pretty practical” in that sense.
“If none of them wanted to have any contact, I’d have to be fine with that.”
While donors can have criteria for the couples they donate to – a particular religious or cultural background, for example – Giddey didn’t.
“I know that they’re going to be raised in loving households, and that’s the most important thing, and they’re so loved.”
She’s in touch with four of the families, who are all Auckland-based.
“We have a message thread on Facebook that we use to check in and send photos, and we’ve had some in-person meet-ups.
“The boys know each other, and they actually all came to my wedding. They had met my parents and met my partner, and they were keen to meet my brother who’d had a daughter, just to see what she looks like.”
The fifth family decided from the beginning that they didn’t want to keep in contact.
“The clinic have to tell me when there’s been a successful birth, which they had, but I don’t know anything further than that. They know how to contact me if they want to, and he can obviously contact me if he ever wants to, but the others have all got a really nice connection with each other.”
She gets to see the other boys about once a year, she says – and knowing them is just a bonus.
“It’s been lovely that they’ve all wanted to meet each other and connect with each other and have all been open to getting to know each other, because they’re all half-siblings.
“They’ve all known that ‘Mum and Dad needed some help to have you’. So as they get older and can understand at different levels, they can support each other through explaining that process to the kids.”
Mary-Jane Stenbeck and her husband Glen are one of the couples who welcomed a child thanks to Laura’s donation – her fifth and last. Their boy Ryan, now 7, was born in 2019.
“My husband and I met when we were 40 and neither of us had children,” Stenbeck tells the Herald.
They married in 2015 and soon started IVF, undergoing several “excruciatingly painful” rounds.
Stenbeck resigned from her corporate role at Air New Zealand in 2017. “[I] reached out to everyone I knew on Messenger – I asked if anyone knew of an egg donor.”
Within minutes, a friend recommended Giddey.
“We were so lucky to be able to meet Laura, especially lucky because there is a limit of five donations one egg donor can make, and we were Laura’s fifth couple,” Stenbeck says.
She remembers sitting with Glen at Laura’s side during the extraction procedure.
“When you are at what feels like a dead end, and you have a complete stranger give a piece of herself so freely ... it is entirely incomprehensible,” she shares.
“She is our angel, and Ryan knows Laura gave [us] her ‘golden egg’ so that we could have him as our son.
“The other families Laura donated to keep in touch with us, so the boys know their half-brothers. It’s the best possible scenario. We thank God every day for Laura.”
Giddey says she would donate to more families if she could.
“There are just so many people that have it so hard trying to have the families that they want ... if you’re okay with needles and you can have that flexibility for a couple of weeks, it makes such a huge difference.”
What does it take to be an egg or sperm donor in New Zealand?
Dr Devashana Gupta, Repromed medical director and a donor doctor, explains that donors need to be citizens or permanent residents of New Zealand within certain age limits.
These vary slightly among clinics; at Repromed, women can donate if they’re between 21 and 35, and men if they’re between 20 and 40.
For the intended parents (IP), it depends what they need in terms of fertility treatment.
“It could be anyone from the rainbow community, a single woman, [a couple with] male factor infertility ... for an egg donor recipient, it could be someone who’s got ovarian insufficiency,” Gupta explains.
Donors undergo checks to test the health of their sperm or their egg count, as well as assessments of their medical and family history, genetic screening and quarantined blood tests for common infections such as HIV and hepatitis.
They undergo counselling, with their partner if they have one. If an egg donor has a partner, they also undergo blood tests and infection screenings.
Donors then create a non-identifying profile for potential parents to view. Egg donors are matched to potential IPs before starting the IVF cycle.
The whole process for both egg and sperm donation can take up to six months including medical and counselling appointments, and multiple appointments during an IVF cycle.
The HART (Human Assisted Reproductive Technology) Act governs IVF and third-party reproduction in New Zealand.
“Based on that, donors have to always be identifiable ... all the donor details are kept at the donor registry, and then the donor-conceived person can find out their identity at the age of 18,” Gupta says.
“Donors can’t be compensated for beyond reasonable expenses, and at our clinic there’s a five-family limit.”
According to the HART register, the number of recorded births of children conceived from sperm and egg donations in New Zealand is 3691 as of November 2024.
It’s been mandatory to register donor births since August 2005, so this number includes voluntary registrations of births before that date.
Some intended parents opt to receive an embryo donation, where a couple have chosen to donate their remaining embryos after their own IVF treatment. In that case, everyone involved has to have joint counselling – and it also involves an ECART (Ethics Committee on Assisted Reproduction Technology) application.
“If it seems that embryo donation is the best form of treatment that’s suitable for these IP, then they can start the process of a frozen embryo transfer,” Gupta says.
Wait lists for both egg and sperm donations are “longer than we’d want”, she adds.
“Approximately, sperm donation is a two-year wait. And then egg donation, it’s an indeterminate period of time. It can take five years, so we advise that an egg donor IP brings their own egg donor, because otherwise they will be waiting for a very long time.
“[What] we want to get out there is awareness of the huge, gaping hole that there is in terms of donor availability – and the incredible gift of life that you can give by being a donor.”