A bride at 49, Kathryn Butuceanu longed for children. But at her age, her best hope lay in fertility clinics and an egg donor, a quest she soon found out could easily cost up to $72,000 for repeated tries.That figure seemed like a deal breaker. Butuceanu (bu-tu-CHA-nu), an administrator at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., and her husband, Cornel, a doctoral student, lived on about $55,000 a year.Help came through a call to Dr. Sanford Rosenberg, a fertility specialist in Richmond, Va., who had started a program capitalizing on lower medical costs overseas. By using an egg donor from Romania and having the eggs fertilized in Bucharest and shipped back to the United States, the Butuceanus cut their costs to $18,000, including enough fertilized eggs for repeated attempts.For the newlyweds it was worth it, with the embryos blossoming into an easy pregnancy on the first try.
