Latest Findings from The OVADO Project

Researching Egg Donation and Fertility Preservation around the Globe.

News and Updates

Celebrating International Women's Day!

I am very excited to be able to write to you on International Women’s Day to bring you news of our recent successes and our research progress. To date, we have over 700 egg donors from around the world enrolled in the survey portion of our study and we have interviewed close to 200! Your interest in participating in our research has been amazing and truly humbling. We have not yet been able to interview everyone who wants to be as we are still a very small team—mostly me—trying to juggle the multiple demands of this project.

The first thing to let you know about is I created a new website at Eggdonorresearch.org. I am working on updating it with videos, media articles, interviews and podcasts, and research findings as publications come out.

Visit our website

We also created a new survey, with links to surveys for first time egg donors, experienced egg donors, and people who freeze or share their eggs for future use. If you have not taken the new survey (launched in October 2020), have new information you would like to update, or have also frozen your eggs and would like to share that experience you can go to the website and click on the “Join Study” tab to be taken to the survey. In the next phase of our research, our plan is to build a follow up survey in order to start a longitudinal study that former participants can update as needed.

Or if you'd like to go directly to the survey, click here:

Take the New Survey!

In the News...

In other exciting news we recently published an article in Salon, on how student debt is driving more American women to donate eggs for pay. The article calls upon the Biden administration to cancel student debt and reform the cost of education. This article and more can also be found on our Media page.

New Research Publications

From the research side, we have a recent publication in Reproductive Biomedicine and Society on Egg Donors’ Perceptions of Feeling Informed about Risks and Benefits. This article, and several posters we presented at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, can be found at the “Our Research” tab on the website.

One ASRM poster that is directly relevant to egg donors addresses how trigger type and number of eggs produced in a single cycle correlates with experiences of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), and another addresses egg donors’ perceptions of long-term health complications. You can scroll down on the “Our Research” tab and find them in the middle of the page.

We also just published another article in Gender, Work and Organization on how race, class, education, and citizenship intersect in the global market for human eggs. This paper is not open access, but anyone interested in reading it and unable to access it online can write me personally and I will send you the pdf of the paper.

Our Research

The OVADO Project | Website