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future recipients. However, OvaCorp’s donor manager is careful not to ask a woman too early about another cycle. She explained, “If it’s a first-timer, I won’t ask her to do it again until she’s cleared the cycle, because I don’t want her to think I’m being insistent upon a mass producer. I’ll say, ‘There’s another couple that would love to work with you. However, let’s just concentrate on this one couple that we’re talking about.’ ”
    But women who attempt to make a “career” of selling eggs provoke disgust among staff, in part because they violate the altruistic framing of donation. Egg agencies generally follow ASRM guidelines limiting women to five cycles, recommendations that are designed to minimize health risks. However, it is not concern for the woman’s health that the OvaCorp donor manager expresses in this denunciation of one such “career” egg donor. “She’s done this as a professional. It’s like a career now. I said, ‘There’s something about that girl.’ Then I called [the director of another egg agency], and she’s like ‘oh yeah, why’s she calling you? I won’t work with her anymore; she worked with me eight times.’ I said, ‘Eight times?! She’s got four kids. She’s on the county. Yeah, I remember that name.’ ”
    In sperm banks, the decision to limit men’s donations centers on the goal of efficiently running a business without offending the sensibilities of the bank’s clients. CryoCorp’s CEO explained,
There’s an ongoing debate of how many vials should you collect from any one donor. If you have 10 donors and collect 10,000 vials from all of them and you have to replace 1 [donor because of genetic or medical issues], it’s taking a hit to your business. If you wind up with 10,000 donors and only collect 10 vials from every single one, you’re inefficiently operating your business. You need to figure out what that sweet spot is. But then there’s the emotional issue from a purchaser. If a client knows that, with X thousand vials out there, there could be 100 or 200 offspring, what’s that point where it just becomes emotionally too many? With my MBA hat on, we are not collecting enough vials per donor, because we’re not operating as efficiently as we should. With my customer relations/consumer hat on, we’re collecting the right number of vials, because clients perceive that it’s important to keep that number to something emotionally tolerable. At what point do you say that’s just not someone I want to be the so-called father of my child, because there’s just way too many possible brothers and sisters out there?
    Given the extensive investment required to screen gamete donors, one would expect programs to gather as much reproductive material as possible from each person. Instead, women are discouraged from becoming “professional” egg donors, and men are prevented from “fathering” too many offspring.
    In keeping with the focus on altruism in egg donation, both OvaCorp and Creative Beginnings’ staffers encourage recipients to send the donor a thank-you note after the egg retrieval. This behavior is not present in the sperm banks. In many cases, egg recipients also give the donor flowers, jewelry, or an additional financial gift, thereby upholding the constructed vision of egg donation as reciprocal gift giving, in which donors help recipients and recipients help donors. Creative Beginnings’ founder explained that if recipients ask her “about getting flowers for the donors, I ask them not to do that, because flowers get in the way. The donor’s sleeping, and she’s not thinking about flowers. If you want to get a gift, get a simple piece of jewelry, because then the donor has something forever that she did something really nice.” This rhetoric even shapes accounting practices; although most programs inform donors that they will be sent a 1099 tax form, which is designed for independent contractors providing a service,