From The Big Story: She Got a Great Deal on Egg Freezing. Then She Spiraled

To hear stories three days earlier, listen on The Big Story: ⁠⁠⁠⁠http://swap.fm/l/wi-bigstorypod-feeddrop A new startup called Cofertility lets young women freeze their eggs—for free. But is anything ever truly free? Written by Maia Hibbett. Originally published on September 9th 2026. For more of the most ambitious, future-defining stories from our favorite human writers, subscribe to The Big Story newsletter: https://www.wired.com/newsletter/the-big-story Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This is the big story from Wired. You're listening to She Got a Great Deal on Egg Freezing. Then She Spiraled. Written by Maya Hibbett. Originally published on September 9th, 2026. A new startup called Co-Fertility lets young women freeze their eggs for free. But is anything ever truly free?

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  The Instagram post, "Precision Guided by Sex and Age," had zeroed in on its target. Yu Chen Tu is a conservatory-trained viola player from Chongqing, China, a lover of science fiction and an aspiring member of the US Army Reserve Officer Training Corps. She's exacting and intense with sky-high standards. And late last spring, just after her 24th birthday, she realized she might be the perfect candidate to freeze her eggs for free. Two goes by Sue, a name she likes because it reminds her of the 2024 body horror film The Substance, whose protagonist tortures herself in pursuit of youth and beauty.

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  To pre-qualify for free egg freezing, all Sue had to do was take a two-minute quiz. "Not everyone can pass this exam," she remembers thinking. "Oh, it seems like a competition." Sue passed, as have thousands of young women allured by the promise of a company called Co-Fertility. "The best time to freeze your eggs is when you can least afford it," goes the company's mantra, uttered on repeat by its public face and CEO, one-time Uber employee Lauren Mackler. Thus was born Co-Fertility's mission: to help women like Sue, who had just received her master's degree in classical music and was preparing to embark on a second bachelor's, preserve their future fertility for $0.

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  But in the United States, there's no such thing as free healthcare. Instead of paying to freeze and store her eggs with money, the going rate in New York City, where Sue lives, is about $18,000. She would use a currency she already had in abundance: the eggs themselves. Co-Fertility's clients must, in the company's words, donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents that need the help of an egg donor to have a baby. It's a model called egg sharing, and it hadn't been commercialized widely in the US until Co-Fertility came along. The Los Angeles-based company launched in 2022, dubbing itself "a new kind of human-centered fertility ecosystem."

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  Sue perused Co-Fertility's website, clicking through text boxes of deep, soothing teal, optimistic light green, a steady purple, and an urgent orange. She was invited to a meeting almost immediately after passing the test, and within days, she was video chatting with an employee who gushed that Sue would be doing the responsible thing for her own future while fulfilling the dreams of a desirous family. In the background of Sue's Zoom, the Co-Fertility employee spied a piano and asked if she could record Sue playing. It'd be enticing to prospective parents who might want the eggs of a piano prodigy. Sue found the proposal preposterous. Her instrument is the viola, not the piano, as anyone who read her file would know.

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  Sue declined, and recalls the saleswoman's disappointment. "The tone of the interaction was weird," Sue thought, "a combination of overeager and saccharine." But she was curious about the company, and she wanted to find out more about the booming business of fertility care that a 24-year-old might not need for years, if ever. On July 29th, 2025, Sue signed a contract with Co-Fertility. The age-old pressure to reproduce has morphed into a biohacking imperative with a feminist sheen. Career-oriented young women, who have no imminent plans to become mothers and no substantiated reason to doubt their abilities to procreate, have succumbed to the messaging that, if

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  they don't want to miss out on this primal right, the time to take charge of future baby-making opportunities is now. "Three in five Gen Z women are concerned about their fertility," Mackler said on a podcast last year, citing a survey by a network of California fertility clinics. The oldest members of that generation are about to turn 30. A donor freezer, I'll call Mona, was 25 when she applied to use Co-Fertility. She had just read a book called The Defining Decade, which argues that the decisions people make in their 20s shape the course of the rest of their life. Fertility was one of those critical areas, and when Mona found Co-Fertility online, she liked how the company seemed to put reproduction within her control.

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  Control is a hot commodity in an exploding market, where venture capital has sunk its teeth into new startups boasting AI-backed conception probability calculators or promising money-back guarantees for frozen eggs that, in the words of one startup, "do not result in a live birth." More established clinics and national chains advertise monthly payment plans, then get bought up by private equity. All these endeavors involve an exchange of cash for egg freezing, and that's where Co-Fertility, which hit $16 million in funding after a Series A round announced last year, offers a unique intervention. In a more traditional cash-pay egg-freezing model, clients, who tend to skew older, work

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  with their own doctors and clinics, keeping their medical information locked behind the gates of HIPAA. But Co-Fertility is not a medical provider, it's a middleman, and it needs to cover the cost of egg freezing by selling aspiring parents on profiles that show their donor's height, weight, racial background, family medical history, and self-administered aptitude ratings. "It's like Tinder," one intended parent tells me. "You swipe through profiles and try to envision your future as defined by those genes." Co-Fertility calls its egg-sharing program "Split," available to those who start between the ages of 21 and 33 and check the right biological boxes.

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  The company further splits Split into two models, "fresh" and "frozen," which Mona and Sue respectively chose. With the newer "frozen" model, donor freezers "cycle first, match later," as the company puts it. Co-Fertility fronts the payment for medical and psychological screening, hormonal stimulation, and surgery, typically across two cycles, then makes up the cost by selling eggs from the first batch to intended parents. The "fresh" model is the flagship. It can be done with just one cycle, and donor freezers match with intended parents before they carry it out. Mona matched with a couple I'm calling Alexis and Greg, who "adored her to no end," as Alexis says.

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  They met once over Zoom and felt they could be friends. Co-Fertility mediated all their communication. The intended parents put up the cash, covering the course of hormonal medications a donor needs to inject herself with for up to two weeks before her egg retrieval, plus genetic testing and psychological screening to ensure the match can proceed. Intended parents have a rough sense of how many eggs they might get, because they see the donor's level of anti-muellerian hormone, or AMH, a commonly used indicator of ovarian reserve. Doctors then track the development of the donor's ovarian follicles, fluid-filled sacs that house maturing eggs. But the only way to know how many eggs you'll get is to go in and get them.

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  Using a needle inserted transvaginally on a wand, a doctor punctures each follicle and sucks up the fluid that the hormone regimen triggered them to produce. The more hormoned, fattened sacs there are, the more eggs, but also the riskier the procedure, because each wet little bundle increases the weight and volume of the ovary. And an ovary that gets too plump on hormones can twist and cut off its own blood flow in a suicidal gonadal maneuver known as ovarian torsion. Mona recalls feeling comforted by Co-Fertility's promise that she could back out at any point, up until her final hormone injection. But the kind of ovarian overreaction that might prompt someone to cancel her cycle

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  could land her in the emergency room, possibly minus an ovary. According to one donor's contract, she'd also have to pay her own medical costs. The company says that provision has since been removed. On Co-Fertility's Instagram, women hike, swim, and manifest career milestones between self-administering, super-easy hormone injections. If it all goes according to plan, there will be some number of eggs on offer that get halved and distributed to the person who produced them and the person who paid. If there's an odd number, the party footing the bill takes the extra. Intended parents using fresh eggs often try to fertilize and implant embryos right away.

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  The donor puts her portion on ice, on the beneficiary's dime, for up to 10 years. Co-Fertility's donors route their blood work and other medical updates through company liaisons referred to as "member advocates." Sue was in near-constant contact with hers, a young woman who peppered her correspondence with smiley faces. "A bit too effusive for a transactional relationship," Sue thought. At one point, Sue's member advocate suggested sending a Co-Fertility staffer on one of Sue's medical appointments to take new photos for her donor profile, and Sue began to wonder how she was being marketed. What was wrong with the current shots?

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  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. See terms. Sue had her first egg retrieval on September 17th, 2025. The yield was strong. The doctor retrieved 26 mature eggs, all of which became CoFertility merchandise, available for sale to intended parents. At her door, Sue received a very, very, very cheap flower, she recalls, and thought, what the hell is this? It was from CoFertility with a note thanking Sue for her donation. Post-egg retrieval symptoms might be compared

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  to a menstrual period cranked through an amplifier. Sue remembers the time as a fog of pain and bleeding, when she felt too sluggish to move around or mount an argument. She was still in the thick of her recovery when her member advocate gave her a call. "When did you want to schedule your next retrieval?" Sue was asked. This was for the batch of eggs that Sue would get to keep. Sue's contract said she had to do the second retrieval within a year of the first. She suggested six months out, maybe March, so she could have time to recover and focus on school. This seems to make her member advocate very upset, Sue recalls. The company was hoping Sue would be ready to go

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  before the end of the year, in November, perhaps? According to a promotional post by medical advisor and doctor Mira Shaw on the CoFertility website, some donors might be ready to repeat the egg retrieval process after one menstrual cycle. In other cases, Shaw writes, "Your fertility doctor may advise a longer waiting period. You'll want to get input from your doctor and also listen to your body's signals." Sue felt that November was too soon. Two other things bothered her. One was that when she tried to view her donor profile, she got stuck on a page that said, "Oops, something went wrong," under a banner in CoFertility's signature teal. The other was that CoFertility's attitude changed a lot,

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  Sue says, especially over the phone. The company, whose warmth she'd once found stifling, was now clipped, cold, all business. Ahead of a second cycle destined to yield no profit for them, Sue felt like she was no longer a priority. Sue's member advocate did not respond to a request for an interview. In an emailed statement, a CoFertility spokesperson says that "The care a donor receives for a cycle has nothing to do with whether the eggs are being donated or kept. And while it's true that subsequent cycles can move faster, it's due to familiarity, not pressure." Sue, wanting to succeed with the program, did as her member advocate suggested and scheduled her second retrieval for November 18th.

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  But she wouldn't let her suspicions go. As she recovered from the first procedure, she hatched a plan to learn more about the company to which she'd just handed her genetic material. "If I say four retrievals," Sue wondered, "what would their reaction be?" She did just that, asking to double her ovarian output. CoFertility would get the first and second batches. Sue would get the third and fourth. The company accepted. Ah, Sue recalls with satisfaction. They became warm again.

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  CoFertility's pitch might seem a bit less convincing if you understand how egg freezing, and later fertilization and conception, really works. "With the company's fresh split model, the egg donor is not going to be able to have the best likelihood of having a live birth from half a cycle," says Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinology specialist at Northwestern's medical school. Technically speaking, you only need one egg to have a baby. But for that one egg to one day become a person, everything has to go right. Human eggs are single cells, fragile, and accustomed to spending their entire existence in a territory spanning a few inches. When you trigger their growth with a hormone regimen,

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  you subvert the expectations of monthly single-cell deployment and prompt a whole batch of potentially dozens to get ready to drop. Some of them won't mature all the way, and with the current technology, immature eggs are about as reproductively useful as a grain of sand. Some won't be genetically normal, which a doctor can't tell until they try to fertilize them with sperm. Others might not freeze right. It's attrition. The egg to embryo to fetus to baby ratio is often described as an inverted pyramid. So when CoFertility donors give away half their frozen eggs, they don't know if their best shot lies in the portion they kept. The fertility experts I spoke to emphasized

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  that CoFertility has an obligation to explain to patients that the service would not offer the same benefit as one where, say, they paid in cash and got to keep all their eggs. "I don't think they drove hard on how low the probability is, to be honest," says Mona, who otherwise describes the company's medical coordination as thorough, careful, and generous. Maybe that would be something that they could have done a little bit better. None of the three donor freezers I interviewed for this story, one of whom ended up being rejected from the program because of low AMH after her initial intake, said they received explicit counseling on how splitting cycles could reduce their chances when using their eggs in the future. Nor did three sets of intended parents I spoke to,

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  all of whom spent thousands of dollars and walked away without a baby. When I put the same question to two more donor freezers whose interviews CoFertility arranged, one said she was pretty sure that was made clear. The other said no, before a spokesperson cut in to add, "It was likely in your informed consent call with the CoFertility team." In a statement to Wired, the company notes that "because CoFertility donors are required to have higher ovarian reserves, they retrieve an average of 24 eggs, or 12 retained per split cycle." Research supports that 12 frozen eggs from an egg donor is a solid start towards a live birth on average, a spokesperson says.

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  They add that the topics covered in the initial intake have evolved over time and can vary depending on a donor's perceived familiarity with the process. Then there are the medical risks. Egg freezing is a low-risk, but not no-risk procedure, reads another CoFertility guide Shaw authored. "The majority of complications," she assures readers, "have to do with what's known as ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, or OHSS, wherein a person's body responds too enthusiastically to a hormone regimen, and swollen blood vessels around the ovaries leak fluid into the rest of the abdomen. A bad case can land a person in the hospital to get the fluid drained, or can cause blood clots,

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  which of course carry a risk of heart attack or stroke." "Severe OHSS occurs in 0.1 to 2% of cycles," Shaw writes. That's the go-to statistic for the industry, but the truth is that data collection on egg donors and freezers' health outcomes is incomplete. Milder cases may resolve on their own and never be documented. A fertility and sterility cross-sectional study found that 10.5% of donors reported OHSS. According to Arizona State University's Embryo Project Encyclopedia, up to a third of people undergoing fertility treatment experience some level of the syndrome. It's more common in younger patients whose existing hormone levels are already high.

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  Sue said she experienced symptoms consistent with mild OHSS after her second cycle, but she never sought a diagnosis. Even without complications, the procedure is a lot for a person to put their body through. When we have patients in their twenties in our clinic that come to us about freezing eggs, we actually counsel them against it, says Lydia Hughes, who recently finished her residency at Northwestern and has, along with Feinberg, argued against co-fertility's model in the past. It's widely accepted that fertility declines over time. The average 25-year-old will produce more high-quality eggs than the average 35-year-old. But plenty of people conceive past the optimal range,

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  and it's in the industry's interest to convince women they're closer to the cliff's edge than they are. While egg freezing is marketed to younger women as a commodity, it's considered most successful as a medical procedure when people come back and use the eggs to have a baby later. Women in the window that co-fertility defines as "the best time to freeze your eggs" are less likely to need them than someone a bit older, especially if they're passing the hormone screenings required to become donors. They'll also run out of free storage in a decade, often by their mid-30s. The way the egg freezing industry sells the service, it's one more box to check on your gamified quest to have it all.

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  The marketing capitalizes on the sad specter of old feminists, who chose their silly careers over motherhood and one day woke up 45 and infertile. "That could never be you," it implies, because younger, more modern women are empowered to preempt the march of time. It almost got me when I first encountered co-fertility a little over two years ago. I had just turned 28 and woke up in a torrent of targeted ads. I was young and career-oriented, and certainly not interested in paying thousands to freeze my eggs, much less have a baby. Maybe, I thought, I should freeze my eggs for free. I applied online and was promptly ushered to join the program. But as I researched the procedure,

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  I began to wonder who really reaped the benefits in a setup like this. The pitch is heavy on empowerment, but it might represent what sociologists call "a constrained choice", where a person's decision-making is limited by their circumstances. "Empowerment implies that you are making a choice with full, genuine autonomy", says Emily Packard-Dawson, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania. But if you are making a choice to freeze your eggs because daycare is so expensive and you have heavy student loan debt and you just need to push off to a different time, is that empowering? "Most important to remember," says the co-fertility spokesperson, "is that the alternative of a split cycle is a full cycle donors pay for themselves",

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  which is often not a realistic option. Not long after Sue signed up to freeze and donate her eggs, an intended parent registered with co-fertility under the name Yang. "What kind of donors are you looking to see?" the portal inquired. "Asian," Yang replied. Yang was able to log into the co-fertility website and scroll through profiles as if shopping online. It's a beautiful layout. Another intended parent told me the agency she switched to after her co-fertility donor backed out looks like it was made in 1990, by comparison. Yang saw photos of potential donors as grinning babies in gingham dresses, then grown up in military fatigues. They could see East Asian donors as requested,

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  but also ones who were pure German, pure Ugandan, a French-Peruvian mix. They could see which donor had a boob job, which one an anorexic half-sister, which one described a parent as "heavy-set". There was a military commander, a deputy district attorney, and a probation officer for kids. With each donor's height and weight, Yang could easily calculate their BMIs. Appended to each profile was an oblong orange button with the words "hold match" in white letters. With a click, Yang could call dibs on their preferred donor's gametes, and co-fertility would know to reserve some genetic material for them. This isn't unique to co-fertility, of course, or even to egg donation.

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  Sperm donor banks advertise profiles like these too. "To aspiring parents, the industry often markets an ideal donor, a perfect donor", often based on "physical characteristics, education, athletic ability, artistic talents," Dawson says. "Nobody thinks of what they're doing as eugenics," she adds. But when you take those choices across thousands of intended parents and a multi-billion-dollar industry, it gets really complicated really quickly. In the case of co-fertility, a customer who feels they need to get their hands on egg freezing might push off their concerns about becoming a donor, until it's too late.

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  Sue had willfully submitted reams of biological and biographical data to co-fertility. But in a dossier she later compiled to document her concerns, she wrote that the platform collects genetic lineage, psychological profiling responses, family medical history, and intergenerational information from a large pool of applicants, many of whom will never actually become donors. Of the hundreds of thousands of initial candidates co-fertility has seen, Mackler tells me less than 5% of applicants ultimately complete a donation cycle, in line with industry standards. The classification of that data, Sue added, approaches commercialized eugenics, a framing the company rejects.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  And she was concerned by the way the company had donors affirm they're of sound mind.

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  Just past the halfway point between Sue's first and second retrievals, she signed a rider to her contract. She'd grown more unsettled by co-fertility's emotional marketing, but the unease only made her more curious. She wanted to go deeper. She agreed to give co-fertility full ownership of the eggs from cycles one and two. She'd wait to receive her own share until cycles three and four. Unless, that is, one of the first two batches yielded six eggs or fewer. Then that would go to Sue, so co-fertility could have a bigger, more profitable one later. Co-fertility says that, in that scenario, a donor would be released from her contract, though the language reviewed by Wired doesn't make that clear.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  If she was at some point deemed medically unable to proceed, any remaining eggs would be split 50-50 between Sue and co-fertility. A key part of co-fertility's raison d'etre is its belief that cash compensation for egg donation is unethical, coercive, transactional, "icky," as Mackler likes to put it. And the gamete exchange model is far nicer. They get a baby, you get a baby, or the idea of a future baby one day, maybe. But the experts I spoke with mostly brushed off this distinction. "Of course, this is still compensation. It's just coming in the form of medical care instead of cold, hard cash. And someone does get cash."

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Though co-fertility says it's not yet profitable, "a commercial industry makes money from recruiting people who will bear the burdens and matching them to people who will receive the benefits," Dawson says. The industry only benefits.

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  To Feinberg, the fertility specialist at Northwestern, COFertility's model is problematic because it undervalues the product that donors are selling. Compensation rates for egg donors are all over the map, but it's not unheard of for a donor to get tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes as high as six figures. At Feinberg's clinic, meanwhile, the total price of egg freezing, including medication, is typically between $10,000 and $13,000. "It's even more complicated than that," says Diane Tober, an anthropologist at the University of Alabama, whose 2025 book, "Egonomics: Charts Hidden Injustices in the Egg Donation Industry."

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  "The means of production in the modern gamete market are skewed by sex," Tober writes. "One group of workers has to throw their hormones out of whack, plump their eggs up so much it wouldn't be sustainable to keep them, and undergo and recover from a surgery. The other experiences nothing more than a mild humiliation ritual." Within the former group, there's further stratification. Tober found an across-the-board average of about $10,000 in compensation for egg donation. But in a sample of 551 egg donors categorized by self-reported race, more than three-quarters of them white, there were massive disparities in high-end compensation. The highest-reported payout for a black donor was $12,000.

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  For a Hispanic donor, $21,000. For an Asian or white donor, $100,000. She found the biggest outlier outside her study: a Chinese-American Ivy League student being offered $25,000 for her eggs. All those zeros are typically reserved for what are known as "elite donors," according to Tober. In that sense, COFertility's model may well be more fair. All the company's donors receive more or less the same payout, variation in egg count aside. So they aren't creating a system in which a donor of a certain race, class, or geography gets a bigger check than her peers. Surge pricing for eggs is what uber alumnus Mackler calls a deeply unethical practice.

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  Yet COFertility markets its own elite selection process, luring well-to-do parents with recent headlines like, "How to Find an Ivy League Egg Donor." In a personal email to Yang, who still hadn't selected a match, Mackler introduced herself as the company's CEO and advertised a donor who was a data scientist with a master's from a top-50 university, aiming to transition into AI engineering and launch her own VC fund one day. This donor had 17 eggs available, for purchase in cohorts of either eight for $28,000, nine for $31,500, or 17 for $52,700, not a penny of which would go to the donor.

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  "Our frozen donors match quickly," Mackler wrote. "So if she is of interest, I'd suggest placing a hold on the match at the top of her profile."

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  When Yang didn't reply, Mackler followed up three days later, noting that the donor she'd mentioned was of Vietnamese descent, and adding two more who were Chinese. She also mentioned COFertility's "embryo guarantee." If Yang bought cohorts of eight or nine eggs, it came with one embryo guaranteed. Cohorts of 10 or 12 guaranteed two, and 17 eggs would guarantee three. One donor had 22 eggs available, four embryos guaranteed, if Yang bought the whole set. This embryo guarantee was a point of frustration for the intended parents I spoke to for this story. On COFertility's website, the company notes that, "If anything outside your control prevents you from reaching

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  the minimum number of embryos you're guaranteed, we'll rematch you for free." Intended parents could get up to two free rematches over two years, with the number of guaranteed embryos varying by agreement. Here again is that tricky word: "free." In addition to the per-egg price that intended parents pay for a frozen cycle, or the medical bills they foot for a fresh one, the company charges a $500 match-initiation fee, and, in the case of parents opting for fresh eggs, a $10,000 cycle coordination fee. If a match doesn't work out, intended parents can apply most of what they paid the company to a replacement donor.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  But they'll have to start over with a new round of medical expenses and third-party fees. That was the choice facing Greg and Alexis, the intended parents who matched with Mona. Mona often travels for work, and she'd told COFertility that she would need two months' notice before completing her cycle. She also goes on and off low doses of an SSRI, which the clinic said she'd have to stop. "That wouldn't be a problem," Mona recalls saying. Alexis and Greg knew about Mona's medication and weren't worried about that. They were, however, worried about the timeline. Alexis was almost 40, and she had begun to fear for her own ability to carry the pregnancy.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  After a few months of delay, they pressed COFertility for answers. They were told that after weaning off the drug, Mona could not handle it whatsoever. Mona was shocked to hear this. "She'd stopped the meds without issue," she tells me. She'd actually quit taking them while there were still pills left in the bottle. And Mona didn't know there was a rush. She'd never gotten the two-month warning that she'd requested. Alexis, meanwhile, had never been told that Mona needed the heads-up. When I talked to Alexis and Mona together about their experience with COFertility, more inconsistencies emerged. As Alexis remembers it, a COFertility employee said that Mona had claimed she had to do what's best for her,

• 36:06Speaker 00

  and she understands it's going to break the match. Mona, hearing this, wipes away tears. "I literally was never told that this match was gonna end or anything," she says. "It seems like a very bad game of telephone," Mona tells me. She thinks that as COFertility ferried messages between parties, they made a few false assumptions and clumsily filled in a few gaps. Alexis is angrier. She got her initial matching fees back, but she couldn't recover thousands more spent on medical bills. After Greg and Alexis moved on, Mona was shuttled into COFertility's frozen program. Even though she was no longer matched, she said it brought her comfort to think that

• 36:50Speaker 00

  whatever information she put on her profile would be shown to potential parents the way she intended it. They would select, she figured, for a queer donor who sometimes took SSRIs. But after the retrieval, she couldn't confirm this was the case. When she tried to view her profile, she confronted the same "oops" page as Sue. When she eventually emailed COFertility, it turned out she had been matched months earlier. Like Sue, she was supposed to know as soon as the match occurred, but the couple had already fertilized the eggs by the time she found out. There were, in fact, three embryos waiting to be implanted. "I just believed what they're saying is true," she tells me. "I feel kind of silly."

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Sue wanted to know how she was being sold and to whom. That's why she created Yang. Yang was never a real person. It was Sue herself in disguise. A day after Sue's second retrieval, 27 eggs this time, she opened up Yang's inbox, where she saw an email from a COFertility employee. "A new donor who'd just become available on their platform has Chinese heritage on both sides," the employee wrote of Sue. "She's a professional musician, who is also pursuing international relations and multilingual studies while training with ROTC. A combination that really reflects her discipline, curiosity, and sense of purpose." The employee added,

• 38:20Speaker 00

  "We believe she'll match very quickly. I'd recommend placing a hold on her profile." According to COFertility's fee schedule, the full batch would set intended parents back a cool $83,700. The prices don't vary by the donor, but when she saw how she was being marketed, Sue thought, "Oh my god, I'm so expensive." Sue spiraled into full-on investigative mode. Bleeding and cramping from her second retrieval, she spent more time on COFertility's website, swimming in its jewel tones. That's when she realized she could find these colors elsewhere on the internet. A website called MyAsianDonor used a nearly identical teal and slightly more muted orange.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Like COFertility, it beckoned intended parents to click on rounded oblong buttons and had a similar site architecture. The California-based MyAsianDonor markets to both Asian-American parental hopefuls and their counterparts overseas, particularly in China, where egg donation is illegal.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Sue was alarmed. She sent Mackler an email on November 21st, attaching a series of screenshots comparing the two sites. CoFertility's response was a Zoom call between Sue, Mackler, and Brittany Israelov, the chief operating officer. In the meeting, Sue claimed that she just wanted to make sure CoFertility understood that its intellectual property might have been copied. But she also asked the executives about the intended parents who may have gotten her first batch of eggs. Who were they? Could CoFertility tell her about them? Sue thought the executives should have been grateful for her research. She remembers them telling her they don't resell eggs, answering a question she never asked. They inquired about Sue's mental health,

• 40:09Speaker 00

  which she took as a condescending diversion. In any event, they decided to cut ties with Sue. Mackler and Israelov informed her that her second cycle would be her last, and CoFertility would return those eggs once she signed a second rider to nullify the first. Sue then tried to email her fertility doctor with questions. "He works for a private fertility clinic that contracts with CoFertility", and Sue trusted him completely. "Please rest assured, I have no concerns across the board with CoFertility's practices and trust their intentions completely", he replied. "I am available should you have a specific medical need in the future", smiley face. The smiley face sent Sue into a tailspin.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  This was not her doctor, she thought. This must be her member advocate. Why did it look like she was emailing Sue from the doctor's account? "I couldn't find any evidence of this myself, and CoFertility says employees would never misrepresent themselves. I also couldn't find evidence that CoFertility ships eggs to China or anywhere else." In a statement to Wired, "CoFertility says that it cannot discuss any individual client's case, but takes clients' concerns seriously, and it's not uncommon for them to meet with company leadership, nor for leadership to take an interest in a client's mental health. We do not resell eggs, but it is an industry practice", the spokesperson says.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  "A donor's eggs go only to the intended parents she has matched with through our program. The company says it is no relationship with or connection to my Asian donor."

• 41:50Speaker 00

  The more time Sue spent thinking about CoFertility, the more she saw it as a house of cards. "Everything is plastic", she tells me. "The smiles, the empowerment, the human-first attitude. It's like a family", said one of the satisfied donors on a call with me and CoFertility's PR. Logged in as Yang, Sue had seen too many sunny and intricate donor profiles for her comfort. Some of them belonged to government employees, and she began to think that this mountain of medical and professional data could pose a national security risk. So Sue compiled her dossier, totaling some 75 pages, and dropped it in the mail, addressed to the Inspector General's office at the U.S. Department of Defense.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  It was marked as "delivered in Alexandria, Virginia", on January 12th, 2026. Four days later, Sue got another email from Israelov. "CoFertility had discovered an intended parent account under a fake name that had been created on Sue's device. This was against the terms of use, and the account had been terminated. Please do not create additional intended parent accounts", Israelov wrote. Yang had been found out. CoFertility's CEO, Mackler, was diagnosed at 29 years old with multicystic peritoneal mesothelioma, a rare abdominal disease where masses grow inexplicably around the reproductive organs. She had to have surgery to remove them,

• 43:20Speaker 00

  and doctors warned her it could compromise her future fertility. Her sister froze her eggs in case Mackler needed them one day. She never did. After the masses were gone, Mackler went on to have two children with her own 30-plus-year-old eggs. The first was conceived the old-fashioned way, the second using in vitro fertilization. She holds up her story as evidence of egg freezing's promise. But hers is indicative of what doctors present as an inherent problem with its use as preventative medicine. Someone goes through this medical process without ultimately needing its outcomes. "In a way, CoFertility, as part of an industry fueled by future anxieties,

• 44:03Speaker 00

  is implying infertility in the person that's donating", as one expert puts it to me. This gets at the heart of how I've come to see the company's dilemma. It's balancing the interests of, essentially, four different parties at once. There are the intended parents, made vulnerable by the financial risk they assume. There are the people who will one day be born from these eggs and may have untold numbers of half-siblings swimming through the world. And there are the donor freezers, who are essentially two different clients in one, with different interests on each side of the hyphen. It's a money-making model bound to test human psychology. Sue brushes off any suggestion that donating her eggs made her lose her grip.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  The one time we talk in person, she has me meet her in one of Manhattan's most opulent basements, beneath Rockefeller Center, where we dodge tourists as she leads me in circles. It's May, about six months since she's been penetrated with a transvaginal needle for a second time and had 27 elite, musically gifted, highly educated, army-level eggs sucked out of her. She hasn't heard back from government officials on her complaint. She is adamant that she is unconcerned about what happens to her gametes now. "It's offspring", she says. "She can make more of them later." But she does eventually sign CoFertility's second rider, and the second batch is hers again. The would-be parents who bought the first set, the company tells her,

• 45:33Speaker 00

  are pausing their use. The clients will still own Sue's eggs, but unless they decide to use them in the future, Sue's relationship with CoFertility is over. No baby will be born, at least not for now. With its matching fee and cost-per-egg rates, CoFertility will get an estimated $81,100. And Sue will go on with her life, her peace of mind frozen in a storage facility in Lower Manhattan, for free.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Thank you for listening to The Big Story from Wired. For more of our journalism, visit wired.com or subscribe to the magazine. We'll be back every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday with new stories for you to listen to. This story was narrated by me, Emily Rich. The producer was Rose Kirchner. Pran Bandi was our mixing and mastering engineer, and our senior features editor is Jason Kay. Special thanks to Wired's global editorial director, Katie Drummond, executive director of Features and Special Projects, Rehan Harmanshi, and executive director of Global Audio, Niko Steele. This series was developed by Michelle O'Brien.

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