Is Using Donor Egg Your Path? A Complete Walkthrough of the Decision Process

Aristotle once said, “It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.”

Facing an infertility diagnosis feels like one of the darkest moments of your life, and finding that light may feel impossible. After planning for parenthood all your life, having one of the most natural choices taken away from you can feel like an unimaginable hurdle.

With time, however, exploring options like egg donation will add that glimmer of light back into your hopes of starting a family.

Below, we talk through some of the key parts of the decision-making process.

Why Consider Donor Egg Above Other Fertility Options?

After finding out that you need to explore other avenues to become parents, you’ll be presented with several options. This may include adoption, use of a gestational carrier, and/or use of donor egg.

Only one of these choices provides you with the opportunity to enjoy pregnancy. Using an egg donor enables you to embark on your dream of becoming a mom, while still getting to nurture your baby as they grow inside you.

But will you feel connected to your baby when using another woman’s eggs?

This concern is only natural. However, taking your time to find the right egg donor will help you to overcome these initial worries and fears.

Will I Be Able to Find the Right Egg Donor?

When you first begin to consider egg donation, your thoughts may naturally lead toward an egg donor you know. A family member or friend who has offered to help.

While this offers a known connection to your baby, there are some important things to consider here.

How will you and the donor feel once the baby arrives? Will the donor want to play an active role in your baby’s life? Will you tell your baby about the donor?

Other options include using a donor via an egg bank. And this needn’t be a cold or clinical process. Rather, egg banks offer access to a multitude of potential donors, each with their own unique traits, characteristics, and achievements. Using the database, you can get to know more about each donor in detail before finding the right one for you. Whether you feel connected to them because of mutual interests or they share similar features to you, the choice is entirely yours.

Should I Choose Fresh or Frozen Donor Egg?

Another big consideration is whether to use fresh or frozen egg donation. The former can provide a higher number of available eggs for fertilization, which is something to note if you do want more than one baby.

However, due to the processes involved in fresh donor eggs, this route is often more expensive. This includes factors like synchronizing yours and the donor’s cycles and finding a suitable donor in a nearby location. The latter may be limited, which may lead to expensive trips as you both travel to the fertility clinic for your appointments.

Isn’t fresh donor egg more successful, though?

Not necessarily. While there used be a significant difference, recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 53.5 percent of fresh donor egg cases resulted in a live birth compared to 45.8 percent of frozen donor egg cases.  The odds of success from use of donor eggs may be different depending on the patient’s history.

How Will I Connect to My Baby?

Even after choosing your egg donor, you may still worry about creating those unbreakable bonds with your baby. Again, this is a completely natural concern when undergoing this process.

Yet, when you get your positive pregnancy test after having the embryos transferred, any unease will fade away as you start to feel your baby growing inside you. From hearing their heartbeat for the first time to feeling their first kick, all of these miraculous moments will start forging those mother-baby bonds you have always wanted.

This relationship only grows when your baby enters the world, too. As you nurture your child and raise them in your family, the journey you have all been on to arrive at this point becomes part of your incredible family ties.

While, at the start, it may have felt like there was no light at the end of the tunnel, today you’re holding one of the brightest lights in your arms. And that’s all thanks to the wonderful choice of egg donation.