My wife and I sat in a Starbucks off the highway in Greenwich, Connecticut, waiting for a non-descript woman who said she would be holding a cardboard box.

I didn’t see her car, her license plate, or even get her last name, but I knew she was a nurse. The handover was quick, and we lucked out on our first haul. She had hooked us up with extra needles, syringes and alcohol wipes. And she gave us a boost of confidence in our slightly unhinged plan to have a child without breaking the bank any further. 

Our second stop was 30 minutes east, in a random carpark, where we scored two bags, iced appropriately. The contents of both pick-ups were still cold by the time we made it home. 

That six-hour tour of southeastern Connecticut made a dent in the list of  medications we needed to start our in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle. In the process, we uncovered the ways in which patients are quietly finding ways to subsidize their fertility costs. 

A daunting $30,000 price tag  

My wife and I live in the New York City area. Once we were 35, we were ready to start a family. The plan was to use my eggs and for me to carry the pregnancy, so we chose a sperm donor who had features resembling my wife’s. 

In 2024, three failed attempts at intrauterine insemination—or IUI, where concentrated sperm is placed into the uterus during ovulation—led us to a fertility clinic in Manhattan. The clinic quoted us $17,850 for a single egg retrieval. 

An egg harvesting cycle spans approximately two weeks. This price tag didn’t include the consult, diagnostic and genetic testing, anesthesia, sperm injection, or embryo-testing parts of that process. It also didn’t include the vital medications that stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs and help time ovulation, so they can be harvested. Just the monitoring appointments, egg retrieval procedure, and inseminating the oocytes, or egg cells, with sperm would clock in at $17,850, roughly half the $30,000 cost of the total IUI cycle.

Neither of us had fertility insurance. I’m self-employed and my wife works for a small business, so we had to pay all our IVF expenses out-of-pocket. New York is one of 15 states that have laws requiring insurance to cover IVF, but these rules tend to come with caveats, such as exempting employers with fewer than 100 employees. 

Not willing to career jump just for benefits, I asked our doctor if there was anything we could do to reduce costs, especially the medication, which was quoted at $6,000 to $8,000. She said sometimes IVF patients donate their unused, unopened medications once they’re done with them. 

I refreshed the r/IVF subreddit “Med Donation” tab every 30 minutes for weeks, so I could be the first to respond if I saw a post with a medication I needed. With 206,000 weekly visitors, I usually saw half a dozen medication donation posts per day. 

I also turned to Facebook Groups like IVF Garage Sale, with around 27,000 members, and the more local NYC IVF/IUI Support Group. While the latter only has 2,700 members, it’s specific to my area. 

Olena Kalo, a co-admin of the NYC IVF/IUI Support Group, took on the role because she wanted to give back to the community after experiencing challenges trying to conceive her second child. The group, which started........

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