Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Join us each week on the Women of Influence podcast, hosted by Aliza Freud and presented by SheSpeaks. Each week, Aliza sits down with trailblazing women from various fields—business leaders, social media influencers, authors, speakers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders—who are using their platforms to create meaningful impact. Discover how these women harness their influence to inspire, motivate, and drive change, and gain actionable insights you can apply to your own life!
Women of Influence by SheSpeaks
Turning Grief Into Grit: Breaking Barriers in Fertility
When Diana Thomas became one of the first women in the United States to give birth through donor egg IVF in 1996, there were no guidelines, agencies, or contracts. It was determination and uncharted territory. Today, as Founder and CEO of The World Egg and Sperm Bank, she is on a mission to bring transparency, ethics, and rigorous standards to a rapidly growing and often misunderstood industry.
Episode Highlights
- Diana’s groundbreaking 15-year journey through infertility and how it shaped her mission to protect and empower future families
- Eye-opening truths about the global egg donation landscape, including trafficking, exploitation, and overlooked legislative gaps
- Why transparency and rigorous screening are critical—and the essential questions every hopeful parent should ask their clinic
- Practical advice for women navigating fertility challenges, including how to advocate for themselves in an emotional and complex process
Whether you are navigating fertility yourself or want to understand an industry that touches millions, Diana’s insights are both eye opening and inspiring.
Links and Resources
Connect with Diana Thomas on LinkedIn
Connect with the The World Egg and Sperm Bank on LinkedIn
Learn more about The World Egg and Sperm Bank
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I give out a book that's called Passport. It says ask these questions when you go into a clinic. I think it's education and speaking out and as a mother of donor children, I know what's going to happen down the road and I really want people to think you know, people prepare for what school their kids are going to go to, but they don't know where the genes came from. You know, we have to get smarter. I think that women are not taught to discriminate about these things sometimes.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the show. Hope you're all having a great week so far. In this week's episode we're covering a topic that affects many women. In fact, one in six women globally deal with infertility and even if maybe this is not something you've dealt with directly, you probably have a woman or no woman in your life who's dealt with infertility. Today's guest is Diana Thomas, and she is one of the first women in the United States to have given birth, back in 1995, to a child through egg donation and using IVF and egg donation. And what Diana went on to do after her experience trying to go through the process of identifying a solution for her infertility and back in the early 1990s there were far fewer solutions for women than there are today. So, based on that experience, diana founded the World Egg and Sperm Bank and really has been dedicated to helping women and men have safe egg and sperm donations in order to give birth to children.
Speaker 2:In this episode Diana talks about her experience and it is so inspiring to see how she took this very difficult experience that she went through and has really turned it into a way to help other people who are dealing with something similar. She talks about the realities of egg donation, the dangers of international egg trafficking, which I did not even know about, and the misinformation that can put families at risk. She also shares tough questions. Every couple should ask their doctor or their clinic and advice that she wishes that she had when she began her own journey. In this eye-opening conversation, you will learn so much more and even hopefully give someone in your life some hope and some information that might be useful to them. Diana's advocacy and her influence in the industry, I think, has been unbelievably strong, and I am excited for you to hear my conversation with Diana Thomas. Here we go.
Speaker 1:Diana, welcome to the show. Well, thank you very much. I'm excited to be here. Great Well.
Speaker 2:I am excited to talk with you because in doing a bit of research about you and your background, I found your story fascinating and I want to start, if we can, with where your journey started here, with what you're doing today. In 1996, you were one of the first women to use IVF in vitro fertilization to give birth to a child in the US, or is that worldwide?
Speaker 1:I had the child in the US but the first hundred babies with donor eggs. Ivf was around a little bit but this was the first introduction of donor egg into IVF.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. I do want to talk a little bit, if we can, so that people understand the space a little bit more In terms of your journey. It sounds like IVF had been around and I don't know kind of how long it had been around, but the fact that you were one of the first to conceive and have a child through a donor egg, how did that process come about for you, Because you are obviously one of the first to do that, I'm assuming it was very new territory. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about?
Speaker 1:I went through 15 years of infertility treatments, starting in the 80s, and it was basically my whole journey through IVF mirrored the very earliest days of the existence of IVF. For the next 20 years it was something of a poster child for every new treatment that came along because it was so new. They really didn't know how to treat women who were infertile and they called a lot of infertility unexplained infertility and I started off with all sorts of low-level technology. For years they considered this a woman's problem back then, when half the time infertility is related to the men. But at that time it was a woman's problem and it was usually because they had endometriosis. That's all they pretty much knew at the time. So I went through, I think, three laparoscopies to remove endometriosis, which was really very minor and wasn't really the problem for me. That's all they knew. But I went through other technologies for a long time and it was in those early days. It was quite a journey. All the shots were intermuscular, they were painful, you'd have all sorts of shortcuts and even the medication which is now pharmaceutically produced since the mid-90s was actually extracted from the urine of menopausal nuns in Rome. They used to have nuns urinating buckets in Rome because the Vatican was actually invested in Sirono, the pharmaceutical company. I know this sounds insane, but there's actually. There's stories about this. It would take 10 days for 10 women urinating in a bucket for a single treatment for women in the US because they were extracting follicle stimulating, hormoneimulating hormone, which women produce in menopause, and they decided to go with nuns because they were also usually disease-free because they were not having intercourse.
Speaker 1:Things have been really, really changed. I mean, it was just very early on. There were no donors, there was just not a lot going on until my late 30s and I was told that there was really nothing left for me to do except a donor egg. And I said, well, what's that? And they said, well, you know, we really don't know that much about it, but you'll just have to figure it out and find a donor because there were no agencies, and find a donor because there were no agencies, there were no guidelines, there were no contracts, there were no laws, there was no FDA auditing, there wasn't anything.
Speaker 1:I had to first of all find an egg donor. Then I had to create all the documents I wanted about her medical history, consenting her about the process, telling her that this was going to be an open identification, I'm the person that she'd be donating for, because I just can't lie to somebody, take their egg and say, oh, you're just donating to somebody. It was a very intimate process for me because I interviewed women. I finally found a woman that I decided you know, I'm just looking for somebody with a similar spirit. And so I took her back to the doctor and the doctor said okay, we'll do egg retrieval and transfer the embryos that are made into your uterus. I sat there and held her hand during retrieval and got to see the embryos in the lab when they were first fertilized. These are things would never happen today. They would just never allow that today. So it was yeah, it's crazy. Then they said doctors asked me can you find donors for other women, some of our other patients?
Speaker 2:That I mean what a what a journey and to be of the first to do this, and just the process. I can imagine how overwhelming that process must have been, because it was like, all right, well, go ahead and find yourself an egg donor. Where do you start? How did you even think to go through that process to find women who might be willing to be egg donors? I'm fascinated, as one of the first that you had to come up with this, you know if you really want something in life, you just figure it out.
Speaker 1:Determination is part of getting where you want to go, and it means failing. I failed so many times in IDF and in vitro for years, and it's about picking yourself up and moving forward. But the women have to be in their 20s and so I went to the university which is ASU, which is Arizona State University, which is the third largest university campus in the country, and I just put an ad in a student paper and I was even shocked. Anybody would even understand it enough to answer the ad. But I had six people answer the ad and I met with them all and some said no, but we ended up with one woman and it all worked out really well said no, but we ended up with one woman and it all worked out really well.
Speaker 2:Well, you just need one that works. I guess that's the truth. But wow, so you had six answer one that ended up working out and you were able to conceive the child your son is that right and gave birth unbelievable yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a gift. I mean, these women are just amazing who help other women. It's just so grateful. I had another woman who helped me have my twins in the year 2000. I met her twice, with two different women and the three siblings.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's amazing. That's amazing so in terms of today. So fast forward. So this was 1996 and then maybe late 90s when you had your twins, or early 2000s when you had your twins. You now have three children and you were asked by doctors to help with other patients right who were looking for egg donors, with other patients right who were looking for egg donors, and you were able to start the consulting agency which is now your company. Tell us a little bit about your company today.
Speaker 1:Well, we are really one of the only egg banks that comply with legislation worldwide and it's very complicated.
Speaker 1:We have to watch family limits and I probably adhere to about 45 pieces of legislation not guidelines, but legislation around the world and each country has a different set of criteria for each donor.
Speaker 1:When I began the egg bank, the American Society of Reproductive Medicine decided that this was experimental. So I went outside the country and I went to Australia and Canada and the UK and started working with women there and we started freezing eggs and shipping them around the world, because the US was still considering it experimental and basically most of the industry caught up to what we were doing and they really didn't like it. That two women in the country were the only two that were freezing eggs and me and Christina Jones in New York kind of got halted and I think after the rest of the crew figured they had caught up, all of a sudden it wasn't experimental anymore and that was in 2012. I had been doing it for eight years before they came on board. So we do everything in our one location, where other egg banks farm out all their procedures to just dozens of other locations. I mean there's reasons why I formed the model that I did.
Speaker 2:I know that the industry really has evolved a lot and you've talked about the need for transparency in egg and sperm donations. Can you talk a little bit about what you've set up?
Speaker 1:and why you've set it up. I decided that I was going to screen all egg donors to the highest worldwide, that any of the sperm and eggs could go anywhere in the world. I didn't have to start segregating them into different legal categories and the need for transparency, you know, having everything in one location so I don't farm out to embryologists all around the world or other clinics or other people who are screening and other. Everything is done our one facility. So every donor walks in our door. We know who they are, we can trace them, we do ID checks and our staff gets to know them and we do interviews and they get through genetic counseling and they go through psychological counseling so that they are really aware of what they're involved in. They go through medical consenting with our staff, our medical staff.
Speaker 1:But we can trace it all the way from her walking in the door through egg stimulation, through egg retrieval, through egg freezing, through shipping the eggs. So we track everything and we double witness every time the egg or the sperm are moved or touched. And the eggs. So we track everything and we double witness every time the egg or the sperm are moved or touched. And the paperwork. I know you hear about these things in the press, about the wrong embryo got transferred to somebody or you know all that kind of stuff going on. We eliminate that problem.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the hurdles that face women and men couples who are willing to donate eggs and to have you know appropriate candidates to donate eggs.
Speaker 1:We go through a huge paring down so donors can apply. They go through screening. Every step of the screening process they have to pass. They have to have certain genetic history that doesn't show generation after generation of cancer. There's so many criteria. We can start with a hundred women and end up with five. Wow, very outset. It's a lot of work to really get to be able to stand behind what you're telling people. You have to be careful, you have to be honest and you do have to be transparent and you really do have to make sure these women and men comply with legislation worldwide.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that's unbelievable. I would not have thought that the funnel, so to speak, would take us from a hundred willing because these are all women who say, yes, I'm interested in being an egg donor to get from that 100 down to five who are viable. And can I just ask because I'm curious about how much of it is health-related issues, physical health in terms of what you said, family history, many generations of cancer, for example, versus like a psychological maybe, evaluation versus they're just the women deciding that it's not for them. I'm just curious if there is one bucket where you really find that people kind of fall off.
Speaker 1:I think it's after interviewing and educating donors and consenting them. That is one place they fall off. Because we will only work with open identity donors too. One of the things I'm not just concerned about the parents, but I'm concerned about the donor, conceived children, and when you're trying to get pregnant, all you're thinking about is the baby in your arm. You're not really thinking about when they're eight years old and they're going to ask questions, what you're going to say.
Speaker 1:Because my children are 28 and 24, I've been through the whole gamut of walking into a doctor's offices and the doctor saying well, he seems to have a history of migraine in your family. And I go well, it's not my family but the egg donors does. It's that knowledge for the benefit of the child as well. But the other bucket, I think, is genetics, because we now look at 6,000 recessive traits. You know, like cystic fibrosis, for example, can have, I don't know, something like 400 mutations. But you can't have the same mutation on the female side as the male side, or the chances of having CF really increases exponentially. It's not engineering children, it's really eliminating disease from children.
Speaker 2:Well, those are very real and it's such an important thing for people to know and be aware of. Going into that with your eyes open, I think, makes so much sense, absolutely. When you talked about the fact that you do have a drop-off once people are educated about your process and understand that there has to be some sort of identification associated, and you get drop-off there in terms of women maybe not wanting to be identified, is that because they don't want to be identified later, when the child is older, let's say? Or is it just that they don't want the details of who they are from a medical standpoint to be shared early or at different points for that child's life?
Speaker 1:as they grow up. Well, first of all, we give all the information that we know about the donor, with the donor's permission, to the intended parents who buy her eggs. So they have a lot of genetic history, they actually have the genetic reports, they have a lot of information history, they actually have the genetic reports, they have a lot of information and the laws basically state that unless there's a real urgent need, that the child cannot contact the donor until the age of 16 or 18, depending on the country, and we have a whole protocol set up so that donor doesn't get called out of the blue. They go to a psychologist and the psychologist talks to the donor and then talks to the child and talks to the parents. Then there's a meeting and I've had a few of those because we've been doing this long enough that we've had some people in Australia whose children are 18 years old, and it's just a great process because usually it's very gratifying for everybody.
Speaker 1:It's just like my children have met our egg donors and you know there's not a connection, and I think it's not just the donors, though I think there's a fear on parents' side that oh my gosh, it's not my genes. Is the child going to love me and I think that's very natural, a natural fear. But anyone who's had a child knows that the bonding is biological and there's nothing you could do to not make that child yours after you're pregnant. Yeah, it works out.
Speaker 2:Can you talk a little bit? You've talked about the trafficking in egg donations and this being a real issue and increasingly an issue, Can you first explain to our audience what is trafficking and donations? Why is it becoming an issue? Well, boy.
Speaker 1:Easy to say. Basically, it's a lot easier for doctors to recruit donors in Cyprus and any developing country where there's a migration of populations, which are usually women and children who suffer the most in these migrations, but they're poor, so they're willing to do these cycles for almost nothing. Some of them even never do see their money. There's Uzbekistan, kazakhstan, there's South Africa. They're coming from Argentina, from immigrants who go to Spain and then they come from Spain and it just creates this quagmire, this subterfuge about where these eggs are coming from, how these donors are treated during a cycle. We don't know what kind of medications they're getting. Are they all being dangerously hyper-stimulated with medication? How many cycles are they going through? In the US it's maximum of six.
Speaker 1:I mean I've seen documents commonly that they go through 26 in Prague, in Ukraine and Wrocław, georgia, Brazil. So India, india. I mean there's an article out about a 12-year-old who they retrieved eggs from in India, 12 years old. So they met her at a watering hole and they have brokers who bring them into clinics and dress them up to look older and wear a wedding necklace and they have a fake husband coming in and that I mean can you imagine being the woman in New York who gets the egg from a 12-year-old child and doesn't even know it? No, I mean, how do you tell your child later? And I mean there's a lot of organized crime involved in it and you can go and read this in the State Department documents and they actually refer to women as renewable resources. So they go from egg donation, prostitution, dancing, they just kind of circulate them.
Speaker 2:So what is the limit? In the US you said it's six cycles. That is the limit for a woman for egg donation, for a donor to donate her eggs. Yes, and some of these trafficking are you looking at as potentially a woman having more than six cycles? Is there documented knowledge or information that shows that it's significantly more than six?
Speaker 1:Indiana, who went to a clinic in Ukraine and documented this for 18 months and was up to 26 cycles with one donor there. But it's I mean, bloomberg Magazine produced a year-long investigation with seven investigative journalists around the world and tracked the eggs from Argentina into California and it's documented in a lot of places. But people here really don't want to see it. They want the baby and they don't really want to know. And doctors really engage in this because they're paying $5,000 for six eggs from another country and then they're turning around and selling them to women for $20,000 in this country.
Speaker 2:What are the egg donors getting In this instance? You said the doctors are paying $5,000. The women who are wanting the eggs are paying $20,000. What are the women who are selling their eggs, so to speak? What are they?
Speaker 1:getting. I think it depends on the situation, but I say mostly it's nothing to $200. And there are some places that will pay up to $1,000. And there are actually some of these donors who figured out that they can do this over and over again and they fly from Russia to California, to Florida, to another country, and every time they fly they get elevated fees for having their proven donors. They've had a lot of eggs produced or they had a child that came from their egg donation. So some people actually market themselves as well. But it doesn't matter, the price is still cheap to the banks here. And then everybody says, well, where did you get that egg? And then everybody says, well, where did you get that egg? And the bank says, oh, from California. But they don't tell you that the donor was flown from Russia to California and that she lied at the border and was giving documents to lie at the border. And sometimes they don't make it through the border.
Speaker 2:So Does that also mean that from a health standpoint, given some of the what we were talking about earlier that your company does in terms of the rigor around the, both physical, psychological health and looking at that frequently just overlooked, or do they still accurately get that information and aren't able to pass that along to the families that are buying these eggs?
Speaker 1:From what I've seen, there's a lot of false data, a lot of fake profiles. There's a lot of paperwork that's completed that isn't accurate. We don't even know. There's no auditing in other countries. The FDA at least audits us in our clinics for infectious disease testing, but do we know that the blood from that woman with a report that was sent over from Ukraine is the same woman whose eggs? Do they match the eggs?
Speaker 1:Do they have somebody sitting in the corner of the room that has no infectious diseases, drawing blood all day while the other eggs are being shipped out, there's nobody to check and when the women are mistreated. These are not countries that women have voices in. They can't go to the police and say I was just abused. There's no place for them to go in this country and we will only work with donors from the US who are residents or have green cards and live here. But they could sue me. You know what are they going to do in another country.
Speaker 2:Right, right. Can you talk a little bit about how you and World Egg and Sperm Bank are working to try to shape the future of this space? For me.
Speaker 1:I feel a personal obligation to speak up. I have to talk about this. I have to. I enjoy these kinds of forums because if somebody's trying to have children which is usually like one in six women have difficulty having children, they should be aware of this. They're walking into this really convoluted space where there's so much misinformation on many websites and everyone will claim transparency and the first and the best and the quality controls, but if you don't know what's going on in the background, it's so hard for a consumer to know or to ask the right questions. I give out a book that's called Passport. It says ask these questions when you go into a clinic.
Speaker 1:I think it's education and speaking out and as a mother of donor children, I know what's going to happen down the road and I really want people to think. People prepare for what school their kids are going to go to, but they don't know where the genes came from. You know, we have to get smarter. I think that women are not taught to discriminate about these things sometimes and if doctors, who women trust so much, don't know what's going on, they don't know what egg banks sometimes where these women got the eggs. They just know the eggs are going to show up in their lab. So there are some people that know and some people that don't. And to some doctors an egg is an egg and to some doctors it's very important that you know the source. So unless they're being asked and unless people are educated to answer it, I quit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's kind of astonishing to me. I just wrote down what you said about how people will prepare for what school the child will go to, but they don't know some of the basics on the genetics of this egg donor. It's kind of astonishing, right. Do you think people are starting to understand the importance of what you seem to have known for a long time?
Speaker 1:You know it is slowly getting out there. I mean I've had clinics now from the UK come up to me at conferences and say, oh, have you heard about this imported egg thing? And what do you guys do? Do you import your eggs? And you're the only one talking about it. So I know it's already gotten around to somebody who's coming back to me and asking me the questions I want them to ask. Think it's just going to benefit everybody and I think until there's a couple of lawsuits widely distributed lawsuits around a child being born with a disease that the paperwork says doesn't exist and that grows larger and broader I think doctors will pay attention a lot more when lawsuits start coming out because they're worried about losing their practice at that point. But do I want to help this patient with her cycle with these imported eggs or do I want to lose my practice? Is probably what it's going to come down to before people start really paying attention.
Speaker 2:I mean I'm kind of astonished that hasn't happened yet. I mean, honestly, just given what sounds like a flood, so to speak, of these egg donors that are coming from places that are not being checked, that this has not happened is kind of a miracle in a lot of ways. If you could go and give women who are struggling with fertility one piece of advice, what would you tell them there's so much.
Speaker 1:I think, first of all, they could read my website. It's very educational, but I think that they have to discern and some of that is really all about them confronting the practice that they're in and asking the right questions. Because if they start looking around themselves, I would suggest you know people do research, but that's not really going to do much good because I can't tell you all the garbage I see on websites and I don't know how anyone can distinguish between reality or not. You know there's a loophole in the FDA that allows these eggs in and I think that people should be lobbying their Congress people to close that loophole. There's nobody paying attention that can actually stop it.
Speaker 2:So make sure that you are working with a reputable source. Know what you're getting into, which is where your company comes in. Diana, if people want to follow you, learn more about the work you're doing, what is the best way for them to do that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. We post questions all the time online and we'd be happy to send people information, but it's going to be one of these things where women talk to women and they tell stories and they connect through non-traditional means to talk to each other, because it doesn't seem to be being picked up in the press and or on TV, or doctors don't want to talk about it too much because so far it's not causing them much trouble. It's just, I feel so for women right now in this, in this mess, because the misinformation man it's just, it's just everywhere. It's so hard. It's really all about bringing it down to you and your physician and make sure that you are asking your physician and they have to answer your questions and they will give you the right answers, because these doctors really want to help women but they just don't know where these things are coming from and the more women that ask them, the more they're going to listen and find out. Kitchen.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, diana, I am grateful for the work that you're doing and for the opportunity to share this with our audience. Thank you for the work you're doing and for being a pioneer, but also trying to bring the industry along with you from a transparency standpoint and also raising awareness about these critical I mean. There's nothing that seems to be more important than doing this and doing it correctly. So thank you for the work you're doing and thank you for spending the time with us today.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for giving me the platform to talk about it. I really appreciate it. My pleasure.
