a) Check that you’re under 33. You CAN donate privately up through age 35, but it’s less likely that you’ll pass screening.


b) Send in some pictures and apply at some agencies. Tell faceless strangers every darkest detail about yourself and your family’s health history. Risk getting rejected if you’ve ever been paid for sex, or injected illegal drugs, or taken anti-depressants, or had more than two male sex partners in the last six months.


c) Undergo a battery of tests involving your veins, vagina, genes, and brain. Are you acceptable for reproduction, or merely human? Are you sure you want to know?


d) Wait for a family to decide you’re a “good match.” This can take from a week to six months, so if you owe money to the mob, you might want to apply at Starbucks while you’re waiting. The family will sign a contract with you releasing you of legal responsibility for any child that’s conceived, guaranteeing anonymity, and outlining the terms of your payment. Be aware that the law could change in the future regarding your right to anonymity.


e) Kick your old birth control habits. Say goodbye to your friendly old hormonal IUD, if you have one.


f) When the process starts, you’ll switch to their birth control pills. You can ask for low-dose, by the way, and I wish I had because remember the fun of starting new birth control hormones? YOU DON’T?? HOW COULD YOU FORGET when YOU KNEW how important it was to me? You don’t love me and I don’t believe you ever did.


g) Prepare to stop bathing in sperm the way you like to do. For your sake, I hope your boyfriend (if you have one) doesn’t pick this moment to get all proprietary about your eggs, vagina, or the $$ looming on the horizon. Weird stuff.


h) Spend 10 (or so) days giving yourself one to three shots a day in your belly and thigh fat. They don’t hurt very much, but it can be nerve-wracking as hell.


i) Swell like Violet Beauregard. (Most people don’t actually retain any weight, though. It’s just bloat.)


j) Get big boobs/more attention from dudes you can’t/don’t want to touch.


k) Be home by injection time every night. Get up early for blood draws and ultrasounds at the hospital almost every morning.


l) Avoid imagining your normally olive-sized ovaries swelling up to the size of upsetting oranges.


m) Don’t exercise or dance or even walk very fast, because your upsetting oranges will begin to knock into other things in your abdomen and complain loudly. They can also end up twisting around in what’s called “ovarian torsion,” cutting themselves off in a way I’m told is similar to one long endless kick in the balls, and potentially resulting in infertility or death. It’s very rare, but when you start to feel your ovaries bouncing around inside you with every step (and you will), you’ll take it seriously.


n) Take no medications or supplements other than Tylenol. And as long as you’re not exercising, dancing, or having sex, might as well throw in: no drinking, either. Hope you have a good Netflix queue!


o) For the last day or two, experience the peculiar (possibly totally in-your-own-head) sensation of having an abdomen full of live goldfish.


p) Go under general sedation for a relatively easy surgery. You’ll go to sleep and walk out just fine afterwards — it’s not like anesthesia. You won’t even need more than a “light day” pad. But still, are you scared of/turned on by operating rooms?


q) Not feel like doing much but sleeping and holding still for the first two days after surgery.


r) Discover why you wanted to sleep and hold still when you try to get back to doing things. By the end of the day each day you’ll be swollen and sore from your huge ovaries knocking around inside you. You’ll be gassy and raising a bitchin’ campaign of PMS. You may find yourself eating a lot of junk food. (I think I ate my first Cinnabon since reaching the age of majority. I’m ashamed.) You still won’t want to walk very fast. You still can’t have sex until you get your next period, partly because you could still be excessively fertile, partly because you don’t want to introduce anything potentially infectious into your compromised reproductive system, and partly because you could still end up with ovarian torsion if things got particularly exciting.


s) Worry about the one inconclusive study that correlates fertility drugs with higher incidence of ovarian cancer.


t) Wait about 10 or 11 days to get your period, in which time your ovaries will stay huge and swollen. Watch your period explode out of you with the force of a thousand champagne corks. Hooray! You feel much better now. Go pay off your credit cards. Get laid.