Meet Alana Cattapan, Canadian Egg Donor Researcher

Pictured above: Alana Cattapan, giving the 2019 John Meisel lecture in Contemporary Political Controversies at Queen’s University.

We Are Egg Donors (WAED) first formed in 2013 and researcher Alana Cattapan was one of the first people to reach out. Over the years Alana has included us at numerous events – from conferences to policy strategy sessions – bringing underrepresented donor voices to the larger conversation around the ethics of third-party reproduction. Today Alana has evolved her work to study egg donors in Canada, a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Our co-founder, Claire Burns, sat down with Alana to talk about her work. Egg donors can participate in her study here.

CLAIRE: Tell us about you!

My name is Alana, and I am a political scientist and feminist health researcher living and working in southwestern Ontario. I’ve been conducting research on who gets included in policy making related to reproduction for almost fifteen years. My focus is how we govern assisted reproductive technologies in Canada, especially egg donation and surrogacy. I also look at things like women’s experiences in a pre- and post-natal care home in Saskatoon, how the concept of “women of reproductive age” became popular, and the emergence of commercial plasma donation in Canada. I currently hold a Canada Research Chair in the politics of reproduction at the University of Waterloo, and I run a research group on reproductive politics in Canada. I also have a puppy named Maggie who has been occupying a lot of my time lately.



CLAIRE: What inspired your research?

Years ago, you had spoken about your experience with egg donation with my roommate, who thought it might be a good idea for her and me to donate our eggs as well – we looked at it as both something very nice to do for someone, but also a way to make some money. I was doing my PhD in political science at the time, and as I started looking into it, I became increasingly interested in reproductive technologies in Canada: the laws, the people, the technology. More specifically, I was curious about the different people included and excluded in the process. I didn’t end up donating my eggs, but this field eventually became the subject of my dissertation.

Canada passed its Assisted Human Reproduction Act in 2004, which, establishes a legal framework for how things like egg donation, sperm donation, and surrogacy can occur. And my research made clear that the law was developed without consulting egg donors in any meaningful way. Fertility doctors, religious figures and pharmaceutical companies were consulted extensively. But no one ever really talked to egg donors.

My current study arrives nearly twenty years after the law was first passed: our aim is to fill that gap. Egg donor voices are important. Egg donors deserve spaces to tell their stories, like the WAED community provides.


Pictured above (left to right): Alana Cattapan, Claire Burns (egg donor, WAED’s co-founder), Francois Baylis (now a University Research Professor at Dalhousie University), and freelance journalist Alison Motluk at an event on egg donation in Canada in 2013.

CLAIRE: Why does this matter to you?

The exclusion from policy making I described before is part of a larger problem, namely that the fertility industry often doesn’t see egg donors as central to the use of reproductive technologies. Egg donors have been telling us, and telling you at WAED, that they are experiencing OHSS more often than the literature suggests, but we still don’t have great data on the longitudinal health outcomes for egg donors. If, to quote my co-investigator Vanessa Gruben, donors were seen “as patients, and not as spare parts,” there would be better data by now. So this study matters to me, as a feminist health researcher, because I care about egg donors’ experiences and opinions being heard, and taken up into improved policy and law.

CLAIRE: How does your study differ from other egg donation studies?

Ours is a relatively large interview-study focusing entirely on people who donated eggs in a Canadian clinic. We think that there are things about the Canadian context–our healthcare system, our geography, and the laws and regulations that govern egg donation–that might make the experiences of egg donors different than other places.

There has been some excellent work in Canada, Alison Motluk’s work on egg donation and my co-investigator Katie Hammond’s doctoral research, are two important examples, but the study we’re doing now builds on that earlier work, and aims to get a bigger sample of donors to give us a better picture of what’s happening in Canadian clinics.



CLAIRE: In your view, how can egg donors best advocate for ourselves?

This is such an important question, and one that you are better equipped to answer than I am. The advocacy that WAED does by supporting egg donors–connecting people, sharing one anothers’ experiences–is so important, and I think has done a lot to make sure that people are more informed about of the benefits and risks associated with egg donation. And I know that you have been involved in bringing the concerns of egg donors to government in the rare cases where consultation with egg donors has occurred.

Egg donors can advocate for themselves in all stages of the egg donation process by asking questions to ensure they have all of the information they need to make an informed decision. Things like asking for a lawyer that is not the one used by the intended parents, or asking your clinic about the risks of the medications, or asking at what point and in what circumstances a cycle would be cancelled can help you protect yourself from being treated less-than-well. Information is so important. But I want to stress that you shouldn’t have to think about this kind of advocacy–egg donors should be protected better by regulation and by agency and clinical practices–but as you know, that isn’t always the case.

And I’m hoping we’ll be able to answer this question more precisely when we’ve completed our interviews, and have heard what egg donors providing at Canadian clinics wish was different about their experiences. I want to better understand what we should be advocating for right now, and to provide evidence to support that.



CLAIRE: What do you hope the outcome of the study will be?

My hope is that the study will provide evidence to inform law, policy and practice. Capturing the stories and experiences of egg donors in the research to bring them to decision makers. I hope that all of this will make it easier for egg donors to trust that they will be treated well, as they should be, throughout the process of egg donation in Canada.



CLAIRE: What is the best way for egg donors to get involved?

Anyone who has donated their eggs to a Canadian clinic since 2004 can participate in an interview. The interviews take no more than 90 minutes, and you’ll get a $20 (Canadian) Amazon gift card for participating.

So to participate, or just to learn more about the study, people should visit our project website. Or people can just email me directly, with questions or to participate in an interview.

 
 

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Raquel Cool