Egg Donation Procedure

Donor Egg

Treatment: What to expect

• If you want to go for an unknown egg donor, you can find her easily through our fertility clinic. You can choose her considering her physical attributes, ethnic history, educational record, and job. Most donors that are chosen are usually between 21 and 29 years old and have mental, medical, and genetic screening. You must know how your clinic selects candidates ” some perform less extended tests and background checks as compared to the others. If you choose to use donor embryos, you can either select a separate egg and sperm donor or make use of a frozen embryo provided by a couple that had extras.
• Once picked a donor, it is advised for you and her to take birth control pills in order to sync your reproductive cycles” she has to ovulate only when your uterine lining is ready to support an embryo. She’ll also be given a fertility drug in order to help her produce several mature eggs for fertilization. Meanwhile, you will also receive estrogen and progesterone for preparing your uterus for pregnancy. Once the eggs are mature, an anesthetic will be given to her for removing the eggs from her ovaries through the insertion of a needle through her vaginal wall with the help of ultrasound for guidance.
• After this, the whole procedure becomes just like that of in vitro fertilization (IVF). The sperm of your partner’s or a donor’s sperm will be merged with your donor’s eggs in a Petri dish in a laboratory. After two to five days, every fertilized egg will become a mass of cells called an embryo. Your doctor then will place two to four embryos into your uterus via your cervix with the help of a thin catheter. Despite it not being a common practice, many experts suggest couples should think of transferring a single embryo to circumvent the risk of multiple pregnancies. Extra embryos, if any, might be frozen in case of failure of this cycle. If the treatment succeeds an embryo will attach in your uterine wall and continue to become offspring. In about 40 percent of ART pregnancies that are done with donor eggs, more than one embryo becomes implanted by itself and women give birth to twins or triplets.