British Egg Shortage

GIRLS ARE TYPICALLY BORN with about two million undeveloped eggs in their ovaries. When adolescence comes and a girl begins to ovulate, one of those eggs is released each month, ready to be fertilized. But that never happened in Barbara Johnson's body. She hit menopause a few years early - as a teenager.

"My periods basically stopped. They didn't really start, to be honest." Barbara said in a quiet voice, sipping tea at her dining room table. "So I knew from the start that I wouldn't be able to have children."

When Barbara married John, reproductive medicine was advanced enough that women could get pregnant using their husband's sperm and an egg donated by another woman. But there was another problem: the chronic shortage in Great Britain of donated eggs.

"We got married in 1993 and we were already on waiting lists then at the hospitals, because they said they had at least a two-year waiting list," Barbara said.

Barbara tried four times over four years to get pregnant. Each time, an anonymous donor's eggs were mixed with John's sperm in a lab dish, then doctors transferred the resulting embryos to Barbara's uterus. On the fourth try, they had a daughter and named her Anna. Now she's 2.

The Johnsons live in a comfortable row house in a far suburb of London. Both of them work as journalists. Under the British infertility system, the Johnson's skipped past others on the waiting list by recruiting fertile women friends and relatives to contribute their eggs to the anonymous donor pool. Barbara says the delicate business of cajoling other women to give eggs on their behalf makes the troubling experience of infertility all the more humiliating.

"The scarcity is just as stressful as the in vitro attempt itself, if not more," Barbara said. "You never know when it's your turn. And if it doesn't work, you're back at square one again. It affects your whole life."