By Emma Whitford, Forbes Staff
“The best time to freeze your eggs is when you are young and can least afford to pay for it,” says Lauren Makler, founder and CEO of Cofertility, a Los Angeles startup with a novel model that addresses three weaknesses in the fertility business, which plays a part in about 100,000 (2.5%) of U.S. births a year. The first two problems, as she suggests, are timing and cost: Women traditionally haven’t sought pricey fertility services until they’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant and are well past 30, by which time each cycle of egg retrieval produces fewer eggs healthy enough to use. That’s why more women who want children—eventually—are freezing their eggs years in advance. But the retrieval procedure and the hormones it requires can cost $10,000 or more, plus another $500 or $1,000 a year to store frozen eggs, making it unaffordable for most young women—particularly when few employers cover the cost of egg freezing before a woman experiences infertility.
The third issue addressed by Cofertility’s new model: the supply of donor eggs. Some women—including those rendered infertile by cancer or other medical conditions—need donor eggs. For women 40 or older, using a donor dramatically increases the chance an implanted embryo will lead to a baby, tripling it by age 45, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest annual report on assisted reproductive technology. Cofertility tackles all these issues by allowing young women to freeze their eggs and store them for up to 10 years for free if they agree to donate half of the eggs retrieved. “All we’re saying is let’s leave out the cash compensation part and enable this woman to keep half of the eggs for her own future,’’ says Makler.
By the CDC’s count, 28,252 in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles in 2021 (that’s 13% of all cycles aimed at producing live births) used donor eggs or embryos. Most European nations bar paying for egg donations and ethics rules in the U.S. discourage it. But donations in the U.S. are driven by money—payments start around $10,000 and can be multiples of that for donors with sought-after qualities, say, an Ivy League college degree.
Noel Rockwell, a 2024 Yale graduate with a major in history of health, science and medicine, first came across an ad for egg donation while scrolling her TikTok For You page. “It was just a woman swinging on this swing in this idyllic nature setting. And the caption was: ‘When you donate your eggs, get $10,000 and a free vacation to Florida,’” Rockwell says. “Then I clicked on the user and it was actually a clinic or a fertility agency, even though it seemed like [the video] was posted by the donor themselves.”
Fascinated, Rockwell studied egg donation advertising for her senior thesis. For historical context, she looked at ads published in the Yale Daily News from 1992 to 2015 (before print ads collapsed). Her conclusion: There was then and is now a high demand for the eggs of Ivy League students and grads, with families willing to pay tens of thousands for them. “I am a tall, white, slim woman. Those things, unsurprisingly, are very, very requested for. I have blue eyes, I go to Yale University and I have a high GPA and SAT score,” Rockwell says. For her research, she asked a clinic representative how much she might earn for her own eggs. “She said, ‘Baseline, I’d probably start you at $25,000, but it could go way, way higher.’ And I’ve seen ads myself—online especially—that are 150 grand if you go to an Ivy League school.”
When Diane Tober, an associate professor and medical anthropologist at the University of Alabama, surveyed more than 700 U.S. donors, 36% cited educational........