What every woman trying to conceive should know about the Egg Donation Process Part I
The egg donation process is not that long and involved but I felt that it’s a good idea to explain in as much detail as possible, I then found that my post was quite long, I decided to split it into 3 parts. Part one covers an introduction to egg donation process, part two covers the harvesting of the eggs, testing etc, part three the actual donation and recipient process.
For some women the whole getting pregnant is fraught with frustration and disappointment, and many have tried so many different ways to fall pregnant. It can be so disheartening each month when that pregnancy test reveals a negative instead of a positive. And they reach a point in looking at Egg Donation as an option, but they are not too sure how it works and what is involved.
We all understand that to get pregnant you need to produce an egg which will meet the sperm and a match is made, but that’s the problem some women have difficulty in producing eggs or the quality of their eggs are not healthy enough to succeed. If a pregnancy should succeed it’s usually difficult for the woman to carry a baby to term.
The situation is bad enough not getting pregnant at all, it’s a lot worse
when you find you are pregnant and then a few weeks or even a couple of months into the pregnancy it miscarries. All hopes and dreams scattered, until you try again and again. All this frustration can be ended with Egg Donation.
Yearly there are about 100,000 women who have their eggs harvested, about 90% of these women do so for their own fertility treatment, and the other 10% the eggs are harvested as donor eggs to help other women with their fertility problems.
In a process called assisted reproductive technology (ART), the eggs are surgically removed from the ovaries, they are then combined with the sperm in a laboratory setting, once the eggs have successfully taken then they will be either returned to the original donor or donated to another woman. There are three methods of doing this the most commonly known is IVF or In Vitro Fertilization, GIFT Gamete Intrafallopian Transfer and ZIFT Zygote Intrafallopian Transfer. This whole process began in the 1980’s when in the first baby was conceived from a donor egg and was born during 1984.