Becoming an egg donor is an important and rewarding decision.
As an egg donor, you have the opportunity to help families grow through your generous gift. The path to egg donation might seem a little confusing, and we want to help you understand your options for going forward on this journey.
Choosing between clinic and agency
For the most part, your options for egg donation are through fertility clinics and agencies. The experiences of working with a clinic or an agency are quite different.
Using a clinic for egg donation means that you go in for treatments at the clinic, donate your eggs, and then they are typically stored on ice until they’re needed. This is certainly a convenient way to donate your eggs, but it doesn’t have the personal touch you may desire.
Working with an agency means working closely with the agency for getting matched with intended parents to provide them with the egg donations they seek. You won’t be asked to donate your eggs and have them reserved on ice until they’re needed; instead, you’ll be matched with a couple and begin the donation process after receiving a match.
Egg banks
Egg banks are often operated by fertility clinics or other related organizations. They are places where eggs are stored – typically as frozen specimens – until they’re needed. When you donate to an egg bank, you don’t know who will receive your eggs, or even where the recipient might live.
Egg banks store eggs with various mother bios and information about their health, intelligence, and personalities. And while you do supply this type of information for matching purposes when working with an agency, generally you’re not just a number floating around in their computer system with indicators like “Ivy league egg donor” attached to your profile.
Match and Transfer
If you work with an agency for a fresh cycle, both you and the intended mother or surrogate will begin a course of medications to prepare you both for the retrieval and transfer. Once the eggs are retrieved from you, they are fertilized, nurtured in the laboratory, and then transferred. If your intended parents choose a frozen embryo transfer, the fertilized eggs would be frozen in preparation for future use.
If you want to learn more about egg donation through an agency, please contact us at Family Inceptions to get more information or to begin the application process.