Ms Missingham has been donating her eggs since the birth of her first daughter, Ripley, five years ago – she experienced the joy of motherhood, but some of her friends had struggled to get pregnant.

“It was so unfair,” she said. 

“I’ve donated six times and there are three little babies born from my egg donations, which is really pretty cool.”

She said many women entered menopause in their 20s, some had low egg quality, others had been through cancer and some had even taken on the venture as single mothers.

“I found that when I started talking about what I was doing, I had a lot my friends and women at work come up to me and say, ‘I had so much trouble, I went through years and years of IVF and I could never have kids’,” she said.

“They open up about it, but I don’t think it’s talked about a lot and that’s why it’s not so well-known.”

Ms Missingham said the process of egg donation was similar to IVF, with two weeks of hormone therapy to stimulate the ovaries.

“Rather than producing one egg, you produce 15 or 20,” she said. 

It then takes just 15 minutes to harvest the eggs under local anaesthetic.

While Ms Missingham has her medical costs covered by the recipients, she is not allowed under Australian law to charge for her donations.

But because she takes an open approach, she said the reward was seeing the children grow up. 

“I know [the mothers], or I get to know them, so one lady I donated to I used to play sports with, one lady I donated to I used to work with and the other ladies were people that I’d met as part of an egg donation forum [Egg Donation Australia],” she said. 

“One of my girlfriends, she came up just for the day with her little one and it was really cute to see her walking and see her talking.”

Ms Missingham said it was interesting to see the part her biology played.

“When I looked at the first little girl who was born from one of my egg donations, she looks more like me than my daughter looks like me so that was very weird, but pretty special,” she said.

“Even though they grow up looking like me, they learn a lot of their mannerisms from their mums so the way that they smile and the way that they talk, so when you see them, you think, ‘that’s so much like their mum’.”

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