Couples Looking for Egg Donors: Your Guide to Finding the Perfect Match

If you’re ready to welcome a child to your family, donated eggs help start and grow families all over the world. For couples looking for egg donors, your journey to find a donor match begins whenever you’re ready! Choosing an egg donor requires careful reflection and consideration of your options. We’ve compiled a few tips for future couples to help you find the best fit. 

 

 

Prioritize Donor Health and Egg Quality

Starting or growing a family, regardless of the method or dynamic, is a significant time commitment with financial, emotional, and legal considerations. This holds true for working with an egg donor and donor bank.

Donor appearance is a priority to many future parents, but good health and gamete quality are absolutely essential. Not all gamete banks are equal. Before browsing a bank’s egg donor catalog, investigate how the bank sources donors and manages egg quality. Healthy, high-quality eggs from donors are more likely to develop into a successful pregnancy and healthy child. 

Donors should be assessed according to all guidelines set by the American Society for Reproductive Health (ASRM). This includes a general physical and mental health assessment, inheritable diseases, genetic disorders, and more. Official gamete banks will vet their potential donors carefully. Egg donors can be disqualified for various reasons, including health, age, and other factors.

Beyond the guidelines set by ASRM, banks may have their own processes in place to retrieve, store, and ship gametes. The efficacy of these processes can further affect gamete quality and success rate.

Working with a professional, experienced gamete bank is essential. At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, our focus is solely on our donors. We are committed to recruiting healthy donors and maintaining rigorous quality control for egg retrieval, storage, and shipment. We manage everything in-house to ensure each step adheres to our high quality standards. With donor egg success rates gathered from clinic data worldwide, you can expect to receive eggs of the highest quality.

 

Understand Your Time Frame

Even once you decide to start or grow your family with donor eggs, the donor recipient process and timeline can vary. It’s essential to understand what to expect so you can plan accordingly and decide on the right time to start.

For instance, if you choose to receive fresh eggs, you will likely have to wait months for donors to cycle. Frozen eggs, on the other hand, are available immediately and can offer complete flexibility with your schedule.

Before you can receive donor eggs, your fertility clinic will also likely conduct a series of physical and mental health assessments to ensure you are ready and able to complete the process safely. If you wish to get started as soon as possible, work with your clinic to prepare your body to receive donor eggs while looking for potential egg donors.

 

Investigate Options, Pricing and Guarantees

Couples looking for egg donors should also take the time to understand the options your gamete bank offers. Do you want eggs or an embryo? Are you planning a larger family? The answers to these questions can influence which packages or bundles will best fit your needs.

 

At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, we offer many options:

• Premium Donor Egg™ – Six premium frozen eggs, with the option to add additional eggs or a blastocyst. We offer a guarantee of one embryo per cohort of six eggs.
• Baby Bundle™ Discount – This money-saving bundle includes six donor eggs from lots of 2-6 eggs remaining from premium donors.
• Custom Choice – Instead of frozen eggs, this option involves a cohort of six fresh eggs that are fertilized using your sperm of choice. Once the donor eggs are fertilized, we vitrify and ship the resulting embryos to your clinic.  
• Fresh Custom Choice™ Embryo Option – Fresh Custom Choice™ Embryo Option allows you to choose an egg donor and undergo a fresh cycle of screening and egg retrieval. Once 6 eggs are retrieved, they are fertilized using donor or partner sperm and the resulting embryos are vitrified and shipped to your clinic to use in your treatment when ready.
• Frozen Custom Choice ™ Embryo Option – The Frozen Custom Choice ™ Embryo Option allows you to select an egg donor with frozen eggs in the bank. After thawing and fertilizing with donor or partner sperm, the resulting embryos can be shipped to your clinic.

 

While a gamete bank’s pricing can influence your decision, it’s essential to remember that the bank’s processes and how they maintain quality should be your top priority. At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, we stand behind all our laboratory, clinical, and administrative operations. We do not outsource various stages of the process! Our experienced, highly-skilled staff follows a single set of enforceable standards applied across all phases, protocols, processes, and people at our singular state-of-the-art facility.

 

Decide Which Egg Donor Traits Matter to You

There is more to selecting a donor than picking a picture from the registry. While genetics and appearance are often vital to couples looking for egg donors, there are many factors to consider. So, how do you find the best egg donor for you and your family?

Common donor traits future parents may consider include the following:

• Physical characteristics
• Blood type 
• Culture/ethnicity
• Level of education
• Hobbies and skills

 

Future couples looking for egg donors may gravitate towards egg donors who have a similar appearance to themselves or the same ethnicity. For example, parents might hope for a future child with dark, curly hair like their own.

Just keep in mind that there is no guarantee which donor egg genetics will be expressed in a future child. Egg donors will possess a variety of genes from their own parents. For example, an egg donor with dark, curly hair may have parents with dark hair and blonde hair. The egg itself may carry only the blonde hair trait, so the child may end up having blonde hair.

There is also a chance that the future child ends up expressing more genes from the sperm than the egg. If the future father’s sperm is used, the future child may end up looking like their father, grandparents, or even great-grandparents.

Other factors, like the donor’s level of education or hobbies, are popular considerations too. However, there is much to learn about nature versus nurture and how these traits from the donor will affect an future child. A donor with an affinity for music does not mean the future child will share the same talents. How the future child is raised and how future parents nurture their interests will greatly impact how the child’s own talents develop.

 

 

Need Help, or Want to Learn More?

Couples looking for egg donors should always choose an egg bank that offers the support, experience, and transparency needed during your journey. Not all egg and sperm banks are equal – comparing guarantees, prices, and donor selections may get you nowhere.

At The World Egg and Sperm Bank, we hold ourselves to the highest possible standard of ethics and quality. From retrieval and freezing to storage and shipment, we manage every step of the process in-house so couples looking for egg donors can trust that the eggs they receive have been handled with care by experienced hands. 

Browse our egg donor registry to get started, or contact us with any questions.

 

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