IVF Egg Donation
ivf Egg Donation Program
Ivf egg donation is a medical treatment for a woman who cant get pregnant naturally. Egg donation refers to the use of eggs donated by another woman who acts as a donor to assist a couple who are trying to become parents. In order to donate eggs, the donor must undertake treatment on an Ivf cycle. During this process, multiple eggs are collected, after which they are fertilised with the recipient partner’s sperm to create embryos. One of the embryos is than placed into the recipient’s uterus. Thus, any children created will be genetically related to the male partner but not to the female recipient.
Although the medical procedure is relatively simple, egg donation can be an emotional and a physically demanding process and it can have serious implications in long term psychosocial, legal and health issues. So before beginning the treatment, the parties involved need to spend a lot of time going through the social, emotional and legal issues to ensure that everyone involved makes the right decisions for themselves.
A woman is born with a finite supply of around 2 million eggs. Her eggs are, normally, released by the body each month, until a women reaches menopause, which occurs, on average, around the age of 51.7 years. It has been established that the egg quality diminishes with age with the best quality eggs released between the ages of 22 to 35. Women over forty experience a slightly faster decline in egg quality. By age 45, a woman will have approximately a 1% chance of conceiving naturally and around a 10% chance of having a pregnancy that carries a genetic problem.
There are many reasons why a woman may need to use donated eggs. In some women, their supply of eggs has ceased or the number and quality of these eggs is reduced. This can occur because they are near menopause. Some women have premature ovarian failure due to treatment for cancer, a genetic history of early menopause or other reasons. Other women, often for reasons unknown, just do not produce eggs that are capable of sustaining a pregnancy. In some cases, a woman may be a carrier of a genetic condition that she does not want to pass on to a child. In these situations, egg donation may be the only option for these women to have a chance of having a baby.
The biggest group of women requesting egg donation is women in their thirties or early to mid forties. They have often undergone several attempts of IVF without any success and the scientific evidence suggests they are not producing eggs that are capable of developing healthy embryos.
The donor’s eggs are collected in the day surgery theater and taken to the laboratory to be fertilised with your partner’s sperm. Embryo transfer, to your uterus, is performed 2 to 3 days after egg collection. The embryo transfer is done in the unit and is normally a simple painless procedure taking only up to 10 minutes. The embryos are drawn up into a fine plastic catheter, which is passed through the cervix and into the upper uterus where the embryos are slowly expelled. A pregnancy test is done 16 days after the egg collection if you have not had a period.
The costs for an ivf egg donation treatment can be very complex. Usually, the recipient is required to pay for all the costs of the donor’s assessment and treatment. Other costs include the costs for the treatment cycle of the recipient, the cost of the recipient monitoring cycle and the hospital costs for the donor and the recipient.
