As more American women delay childbirth, the fertility industry is booming. According to national data from the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), more women than ever are using donor eggs to conceive - which means healthy college girls are in-demand, and in-the-money. Yet, according to undergrad Sarah Druckenmiller, CC '12, intern at NYU's Fertility Center, awareness about the risks associated with egg donation is lacking. 

Ads posted around campuses and in college newspapers across the country often read like this: "Earn $8,000 or more to donate your eggs." The "Bundles of Joy" agency advertisement depicts two college girls carrying backpacks. The ad reads: "Donating my eggs helped me pay my tuition." Donor agencies wants your healthy, young eggs and will pay you thousands for them. So, how much can you really make as a donor, and what are the medical risks?

Dr. Nicole Noyes, Director of Reproductive Surgery at the NYU's Fertility Center says, "Donors are allowed, according to the ASRM [American Society of Reproductive Medicine] guidelines, to get paid and do it six times. For a long time, we only allowed donors to do it three or four times in this clinic, but now we realize if we don't let a donor do it more, and they wanna do it more, they just go to another clinic in the city. So we've upped the number of tries we allow to six."

But the ASRM makes recommendations - not regulations. Dr. Noyes adds, "Is it mandated to follow the guidelines? No. Do you get in trouble if you don't follow the guidelines? No." Every time you donate you get paid, and you can hop from clinic to clinic selling your eggs. In a normal monthly cycle, a woman only makes one egg. But as a donor, you'll be injected with hormones that make you produce multiple eggs. The hormone is called follicle stimulating hormone. 

Dr. Noyes explains: "It stimulates the follicles of the ovaries to produce eggs. So instead of one egg, you'll have maybe 10 or 20 or even 30 or 40 in a donor who's young."  Keep in mind, the clinic takes the profit from this increase. As a donor, you are paid once per surgery no matter how many eggs you produce. 

Is it safe? That question is largely unanswered because this industry is unregulated. There is no medical registry for donors - so we have no way of knowing what long term risks are. 

Dr. Noyes expressed her concern about this: "There isn't long term follow-up on donors. There isn't a National Registry in America. I'm quite surprised about that. Some other countries do have registries. I personally feel it would be better if there were registries"

Egg retrieval is invasive surgery, and risks like excessive bleeding or infection are the same as with most internal surgery. But most commonly, egg donors experience ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, which Dr. Noyes says feels quite uncomfortable - much like being very full.

Noyes explains: "Ovarian hyper-stimulation is a very important thing to counsel a donor about, because young donors tend to stimulate very well. They tend to have a lot of eggs and they sort of all get mild ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome."

Sarah Druckenmiller, Columbia College undergrad currently interns at the NYU Fertility Clinic. She conducted a national survey to test awareness about egg donation among college students. Sarah says, "[Prospective Donors] wanted to know how many different people their eggs went to. [They asked] whether there were six different people who had their children or just one."

As an anonymous egg donor, you have no right to parental information. And the number of people parenting your children can quickly increase exponentially...

Dr. Noyes adds, "If you have a donor that you now stimulates and makes 60 eggs with one donation, which sometimes they do, I mean that's not what we try to do but it happens. So if you get 60 eggs and say, if I stimulate her 6 times, that's 360 eggs."

The President of Barnard College, and author of the book "The Baby Business," Deborah Spar is an expert on the fertility industry. When asked how many eggs a donor can sell, she said: "There’s no regulatory cap, no cap by law. The market for egg donors is defined by eggs. Nobody wants your eggs once you're older than 30. It’s a market for young women.  But in practical time –you have an infinite number of eggs during your fertile years."

Commenting on the industry as a whole, Spar said: “We know the interest in donor eggs is expanding. For a large period of time women didn’t want to use donor eggs. It's only in past five years that women have become more comfortable with the idea of using donors, and are moving to donors more quickly in fertilization process. Now, reportedly clinics are urging older women to move to donor eggs after one or two failed cycles. With the new technology of egg freezing, it’s obvious that your going to get a market around frozen eggs."

According to the experts, egg donation is a high risk, high return market.