COLUMN ONE : Giver of Life, Again and Again : ‘Super-donors’ repeatedly undergo a lengthy, painful process to help fertility clinics meet the high demand for eggs. ‘I’m proud that I can do this,’ says one woman. ‘I’m No. 1 at giving eggs.’

It’s shortly after 8 a.m. when Kathryn Havran, a tall, lithe blonde wearing shorts and a lace-up top, breezes into the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care in Redondo Beach.

Stopping briefly to say hello to the clinic’s employees, Havran sets down her coffee mug, grabs a plastic cup and strides into the bathroom. When she emerges with a urine sample a few minutes later, she rummages through the nurse’s desk for a pen and writes her name and the date on the label.

Havran knows the routine.

A 33-year-old actress and former model, she is here for the eighth time in less than three years to donate eggs from her ovaries to a woman who cannot have children of her own.

It’s a grueling process, involving three weeks of injections, blood tests, ultrasounds, mood swings and a painful procedure that will eventually yield about two dozen eggs.

Havran puts up with the discomfort and inconvenience in part because couples who want her eggs pay her $1,650 each time she goes through the ordeal. But money, she says, isn’t the only reason.

“They need me, and I like being needed,” Havran said. “A lot of people measure success through money. But I’ve had success through this.”

Havran is one among a small, select group of super-donors nationwide who repeatedly produce eggs for infertile couples--most of whom they will never meet. Their emergence on the fertility scene reflects the fast-growing use in recent years of egg donation, which involves extracting eggs from a donor, fertilizing them in a test tube, and implanting the embryos into an infertile woman.

In 1990, there were 67 fertility centers in the country using donor egg technology--nearly quadruple the number in 1987, according to the most recent statistics published by the American Fertility Society. During the same three-year period, the number of babies born annually as a result of the procedure rose from 16 to 165.

The rising demand for eggs has not been easy to meet. Qualified donors are few and far between. And because the process is strenuous and time-consuming, what donors there are tend to give eggs only once or twice. That is prompting fertility clinics to turn increasingly to super-donors like Havran for repeat performances.

“I’ve got a handful now that have done it a dozen or more times,” said Mark V. Sauer, who heads USC’s egg donation program. “In the last year and a half, we have really upped our volume. So I wouldn’t be surprised if the number of women (donating eggs numerous times) also goes up.”

For now, Havran is considered the Queen Bee at the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care in Redondo Beach, one of the country’s most successful fertility clinics. Since January, 1990, her eggs have allowed four women to give birth to five babies.

While her productivity earns her accolades from the clinic’s physicians, who call her “our No. 1 egg donor,” not everyone is so enthusiastic.

Some bioethicists question whether it is wise to allow a small group of women to give their gametes to so many couples because of the chance, however remote, that the donors’ biological offspring may one day meet and marry. Others say that allowing money to change hands creates the potential for exploitation of either the givers or the recipients.

Havran’s husband, John, fears that his wife may be endangering her physical or mental health by repeatedly undergoing the procedure.

“You can’t fool around with your chemistry like that,” he said. “She’s like the No. 1 star over there, the baby-maker. And they keep calling and calling. That’s great, but I’m just wondering: 10 years from now, who is going to be calling and saying ‘How are you doing?’ ”

Havran downplays her husband’s concerns. She takes pride in being a fertility pioneer and plans to continue donating eggs. She says she is not concerned about her future fertility because she trusts the clinic’s doctors and she and her husband already have a son, age 13, and can’t afford more children right now.

“I’m proud that I can do this,” Havran said. “Some people are proud of doing certain things. I’m No. 1 at giving eggs.”

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Key to Havran’s proficiency is the progress made by the clinic using her services--the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care.

Since opening its doors in 1986--two years after the world’s first baby was born to an infertile woman--it has performed a growing number of in-vitro fertilizations using donated eggs.

From 1989 to 1991, the clinic’s doctors, Arthur L. Wisot and David R. Meldrum, attempted 125 of the procedures, nearly half of which resulted in births. With a success rate like that--the average rate nationally is only 22%--demand is strong. Patients come from as far as Australia and the Philippines, paying $11,000 for each attempted pregnancy.

Some prefer using the eggs of a sister or a friend, but doctors say most women would rather use an anonymous egg donor so that their children will not be confused about having an aunt who is really their biological mother.

With demand for eggs outstripping the supply, fertility clinics have begun recruiting women to serve as egg donors for their patients. The Center for Advanced Reproductive Care has about 10 women on its roster, but Havran is clearly the donor of choice.

Several qualities make her ideal. For one, she fills the doctors’ basic criteria, something only one in 20 would-be donors can do. She is between 21 and 35 and already has a child of her own. Although her father suffered from diabetes, she has no other family history of hereditary diseases. She has had the same sexual partner for at least the past six months and has never contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

She also is not a lesbian or a vegetarian. Lesbians are screened out because of the chance that homosexuality may be hereditary, and vegetarians are excluded because their diet can affect the ovaries’ ability to produce certain hormones, doctors at the clinic say.

Nor does it hurt that Havran is physically beautiful. Her blonde hair, green eyes and trim 5-foot-9-inch frame match the profile of a number of the clinic’s patients, most of whom try to find donors similar in appearance to themselves, donor coordinator Cathy Stubbs said.

Havran is also reliable about showing up for her appointments and taking her drugs, and unusually adept at handling the egg retrieval procedure with a minimum of discomfort. Said Stubbs: “I wish I had about 20 clones of her in different hair colors.”

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It is tempting to assume that Havran’s decision to donate eggs is merely another attempt on her part to cash in on her good looks.

The former cheerleader captain began modeling at 12. Eight years later, after her son, Blaise, was born, she took a job as a Playboy bunny in a New Jersey night club. Later, she turned to acting, landing minor parts in such television shows as “Dallas” and “Hard Copy.”

And Havran makes no bones about needing the money. Though her husband runs his own construction company, the couple are far from financially secure. They rent a small house in Redondo Beach and depend on what she can earn from an assortment of odd jobs--including a stint as a trainer in a men’s weight gym and most recently as a movie production assistant--to make ends meet.

But Havran resents the suggestion that money is all she is after.

She says she did not know egg donors were paid when she responded to the clinic’s newspaper advertisement three years ago. The ad said the clinic was seeking women who are healthy, under 35 and interested in having the satisfaction of “helping someone in a very special way.”

Havran, who says she has always enjoyed doing “off-the-wall kinds of things,” was curious. Once she learned more about the procedure, she says, she came to regard egg donation as the ultimate charity work.

And Havran has a distinct charitable streak.

The second of three daughters in a close-knit Catholic family, she has made helping others a part of her life since high school.

She regularly donates blood, and in recent years has done volunteer and fund-raising work for organizations including Cheer for Children, a South Bay group that feeds and clothes needy handicapped children, and California Special Olympics, which provides sports training and competition for mentally retarded children and adults.

“She has a heart of gold with children,” said Cheer for Children’s president, Pamela Edwards.

Havran, a self-described feminist, says her charity work has introduced her to dozens of women with children they neither wanted nor could afford. Donating eggs to couples willing and able to provide children with warm and loving homes is her way of balancing the scales, she said.

“I think everyone who really wants a child should be able to have them,” Havran said.

Not everyone agrees.

Among the more predictable opponents are the Roman Catholic Church, which in 1987 issued strict prohibitions against both artificial insemination and any type of in-vitro fertilization, and Orthodox Jews, who are concerned about the clarity of family lines.

But even some of those who support assisted fertility techniques question the ethics of allowing infertile women to pay others for eggs. One is LeRoy Walters, director of the Center for Bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a member of the American Fertility Society’s ethics committee. Walters favors a gift system, similar to the one in France, which does not allow money to change hands.

“I think people who are selling blood or plasma or reproductive cells have at least some incentive for not making full disclosure about their medical histories,” he said. “But if there is going to be a commercial system . . . I would want to see good guidelines set up and adhered to on the screening of the egg or semen providers.”

Walters said he is also concerned about the health implications of egg donation--especially for women who repeatedly undergo the procedure.

There are risks worth considering. The drugs used to stimulate ovulation in donors can cause ovarian cysts, doctors say. Donors can also become pregnant if they fail to heed their doctors’ warnings to abstain from sexual intercourse around the time the eggs are scheduled for removal.

And because a needle is used to retrieve the eggs, doctors say, the donor’s internal organs are at risk of bleeding, injury or infection, which in rare cases can cause infertility.

“I worry whether young women are in any way compromising their future reproductive plans by entering in a program like this multiple times,” Walters said.

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To Havran, the most compelling arguments in the egg donation debate come from people such as Patricia Walsh, a 41-year-old professor of education in Queensland, Australia, who has been trying to get pregnant for years.

Women usually seek donated eggs because their ovaries have prematurely stopped functioning or have been removed surgically because of cancer or other ailments. Also considered prime recipients for donated eggs are women of advanced reproductive age--women in their late 30s or early 40s whose egg quality has declined.

Walsh’s problem conceiving a child, however, is unexplained. Fertility drugs didn’t help, nor did a surgical procedure to reduce tissue buildup in her uterus. “It’s frustrating,” Walsh said. “When (doctors) don’t know the problem, they just do what they can and you never know why it’s not working.”

As a last-ditch attempt to have a child, she decided last fall to try egg donation. Initially, she wanted to use eggs from her sister, who is 31 and has children of her own. But the sister, who lives in Atlanta, was unable to take time away from her family.

Because advertising for egg donors is frowned upon in Australia, Walsh contacted the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care in Redondo Beach and flew to Los Angeles in September. She picked a donor from the clinic’s roster, but just before she was to begin the process, the donor had a family emergency and had to fly to New York.

Havran agreed to step in. On Sept. 18 she appeared at the center to receive the first of a series of blood tests and vaginal ultrasounds.

“I was very grateful she came through in a pinch,” Walsh said, who opted not to meet Havran in person. “It’s amazing to me that she’s gone through this process so many times.”

While a man can easily donate millions of sperm through ejaculation, women must endure a far more time-consuming, invasive and physically challenging procedure to donate just a couple of dozen eggs.

That’s because healthy women--with a lifetime supply of about 400,000 eggs--typically release just one egg in a given menstrual cycle. To increase the chances of an egg recipient achieving pregnancy, doctors try to collect a large crop of eggs from their donors. The process, which involves the administering of drugs to stimulate extra egg production, usually takes about three weeks.

At the Redondo Beach clinic, doctors start the process by suppressing ovulation--a step, they say, that eventually yields a larger and healthier crop of eggs. They do so with a drug called Lupron. Havran had to inject the drug into her thigh every day for two weeks, leaving her leg marked and bruised.

To monitor her progress, doctors required her to come in for frequent morning appointments. When she started daily injections of Pergonal, a drug that stimulates her ovaries to produce maturing eggs, the demands of the process increased.

Unlike the first set of injections, Pergonal shots must go into muscle--her backside--at precisely the same time every evening. When she was working as a waitress on the evening shift last year, her husband had to come to the restaurant every night to give her the day’s dose of Pergonal.

This time, she had no night job to interfere with her injection schedule. But the increased egg production profoundly affected her physically and emotionally.

Most noticeably, Havran’s abdomen began to swell. As it did, her husband said, she became increasingly irritable--more so than she ever had in the past. Things got so bad, he says, that their relationship began to suffer.

“I told her ‘You want a divorce? Go,’ ” he said. “Now she’s pretty much back to normal--the day-in-day-out Kathryn. But the way I think, you lose her for a while each time. . . . The mood swings are unbelievable.”

Finally, she was ready to have the eggs removed. A needle was inserted through the wall of her vagina, and the eggs were sucked into a glass tube. To alleviate discomfort, she was given a pain reliever and a portable CD player with a disc of Mozart.

Later that day, Havran’s eggs were mixed with sperm from Walsh’s husband. Four of the embryos were deposited in Walsh’s uterus, and the remaining ones were frozen in nitrogen. In the end, none of the embryos placed in her uterus developed, but Walsh said she plans to try to get pregnant again soon with some of the frozen embryos.

Havran was disappointed to learn the results, even though she had never met Walsh. “I feel really bad when it doesn’t take,” she said. “I think about how badly they want to have children. And it costs so much. Sometimes I don’t even ask anymore.”

For Havran, the successes are the true reward. One woman who recently gave birth to a child born of one of Havran’s eggs sent her a letter of thanks. “Although I don’t know you, I feel as though I know what a special person you are,” the woman wrote. “You have given us an opportunity to become a complete family and the gift of life is certainly the most important and meaningful gift anyone could ever give.”

Havran feels strongly that the children born of her eggs belong to the couple that raises them, but she says she cannot help feeling a connection to the babies. She says she often finds herself peeking into strollers, wondering if the child inside may be one of hers.

She sometimes thinks about what would happen if her son fell in love with one of his biological half sisters, but she says that is more the stuff of movies than a cause for true concern.

Often, she imagines what it would be like to meet a child bearing her telltale almond-shaped green eyes.

“It would be the greatest thing,” Havran said. “I don’t think I would say anything to the kid, but inside, I would feel like a million bucks. To me, it’s the ultimate gift. There’s no price on that. Not too many people could do what I did.”

A DONOR’S ORDEAL

Kathryn Havran, 33, is donating eggs from her ovaries to Patricia Walsh, a 41-year-old professor of education in Queensland, Australia, who has been trying to have a child for the last 2 1/2 years. Egg donation technology allows doctors to stimulate a fertile woman’s ovaries to produce a large number of eggs, fertilize them with sperm and then implant several of them into an infertile woman’s uterus. To stimulate her egg production, Kathryn undergoes a grueling process involving nearly three weeks of injections, blood tests and ultrasounds. When the eggs are finally ready to be retrieved, Dr. Arthur Wisot of the Center for Advanced Reproductive Care in Redondo Beach inserts a long needle through the wall of her vagina to extract eggs from her ovaries. The eggs will be mixed with sperm from Patricia’s husband and the fertilized eggs, or embryos, will be implanted into her uterus two days later.

DONOR: Kathryn

Friday, Sept. 18 (start of cycle): Kathryn undergoes a ultrasound to examine her ovaries and blood tests to check her hormone levels. She receives a bagful of disposable needles and several vials of Lupron, an ovulation suppresant that she must inject into herself every morning for the next few weeks.

Tuesday, Sept. 29: Kathryn undergoes another ultrasound and more blood tests. She continues taking Lupron and receives a nine-day supply of Pergonal, an ovulation stimulant that will cause her to produce an unusually large quantity of eggs.

Wednesday, Sept. 30: At home, Kathryn receives her first injection of Pergonal. Because these injections are difficult to administer--they have to go into muscle tissue--her husband is recruited to give them.

Monday, Oct. 5: Kathryn undergoes a third ultrasound to determine how her ovaries are responding to the medication.

Wednesday, Oct. 7: Doctors take another blood sample from Kathryn and use ultrasound to count and measure her eggs. They discover four sizable eggs in her right ovary and two in her left ovary.

Friday, Oct. 9: After undergoing another ultrasound to check on the development of her eggs, Kathryn receives an injection of HCG, a pregnancy hormone that helps prepare her eggs for retrieval.

Sunday, Oct. 11: Kathryn undergoes an outpatient procedure in which 24 eggs are removed from her ovaries. That evening, the eggs are placed in a test tube and inseminated with sperm from Patricia’s husband.

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RECIPIENT: Patricia

Friday, Sept. 18 (start of cycle): The drug is also administered to Patricia to enable doctors to synchronize her menstrual cycle with Kathryn’s.

Wednesday, Sept. 23: Patricia begins taking Estrace pills to develop the lining of her uterus, known as the endometrium.

Saturday, Oct. 10: Patricia receives an injection of Progesterone, a drug that further prepares the lining of her uterus for implantation of an embryo.

Tuesday, Oct. 13: Four of the best-fertilized eggs, or embryos, are implanted into Patricia’s uterus. The other embryos had been frozen and stored in nitrogen the day before.

Egg Retrieval: Kathryn undergoes a procedure in which doctors use a long needle to remove 24 maturing eggs from her ovaries. The microscopic eggs are sucked through a long needle into a test tube. They will be fertilized with sperm that evening in preparation for implantation.

Embryo Transfer: Patricia undergoes an office procedure to implant the fertilized eggs, or embryos, into her uterus. Doctors use a syringe attached to a long catheter to deposit four of the best embryos. It will take a couple of weeks before doctors discover that none of the embryos took. Pregnancy did not occur.