When Eloise Drane spotted a small classified ad for egg donation in a San Jose newspaper in 1998, she had no idea it would set her on a path that would change the landscape of fertility care for Black families. Long before founding Family Inceptions, a surrogacy and egg donation agency in Georgia, Drane was already imagining herself as a donor—and discovering just how few women of color were represented in the space. For Drane, the decision wasn’t a dramatic turning point or a single galvanizing moment.
It was the quiet but steady frustration of seeing, over and over, how few Black donors appeared in databases. She knew what that invisibility meant for other Black women and families—longer wait times, fewer matches, and the message that their genetic legacies were somehow less valued. Drane, who lived in Atlanta and had recently donated a kidney to her cousin, jotted down the ad’s information.
It would be another year before she revisited the idea. When Drane first contacted the clinic from the ad, she was concerned the staff would tell her she didn’t qualify because she didn’t live in California. Instead, she was met with a more concerning response: Black women didn’t have fertility issues.
This contributed to widespread misconceptions and biases within the medical community, including the myth that Black women were less likely to experience fertility challenges. Still, Drane went ahead and submitted her information to the clinic. Nearly 10 months later, the clinic reached out informing her that a family was interested.
Excited, Drane moved ahead with her first match and donated her eggs through the clinic to a family she’d paired with in Troy, Michigan. Drane ultimately donated her eggs six times, including twice for the same family, and her experience revealed something striking about the fertility world: No one looked like her. There were no staff members or other patients who looked like me,” Drane says.
And as it turns out, that clinic she visited in the late ’90s was dead wrong: Data shows that Black women face infertility rates roughly twice as high as those of white women, yet only about 9% of egg donors in major U.S. egg banks are Black, even though Black women make up around 14% of the reproductive-age population. This gap limits hopeful parents’ access to donors who share their racial or ethnic backgrounds, creating even more barriers for families seeking culturally and genetically compatible fertility care. In fact, after posting her information on a classified board called TASC.org (Treatment Alternatives for Stronger Communities), within two hours, Drane had nearly 25 emails from Black women saying they were desperately searching for Black egg donors but couldn’t find any.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
