How To Get Donor Eggs For IVF

How do I get donor eggs for in vitro fertilization?

Women who need donor eggs have to find an egg donor. And there's any number of ways of going about this. When we first started doing egg donation, our donation program was entirely non-anonymous. In other words, the egg donors always met the recipients. About half the donors were sisters at that time. The recipients were women with premature ovarian failure, and so they were young, their sisters were young, and it was fairly simple to get their sisters, then, to donate the egg. I still like this as a method. I think it's wonderful to have donation within the family because of course the family tree and the family heritage is maintained that way, never mind that it's cheaper. However, if a woman in her late forties wants to use a donor egg, her sister is very likely to be similar in age to the recipient and therefore also in her forties, and those women do not make very good egg donors even if they are not yet menopausal. And so they very commonly end up having to use an anonymous egg donor, commonly obtained through an egg donor registry, or some donation program where these women register and then go through the ovarian stimulation and the egg retrieval in exchange for some financial payment. The third way to get an egg donor besides using a family member or an anonymous egg donor is to use a friend who may be able to donate. And this, I think, is also a very nice way of going about it. It's cheaper, you know who that person is, you know what to expect from them, and you have some kind of a personal sense of their family heritage which is not quite as easy to obtain in an anonymous egg donor who comes from a registry, although that, of course, is the majority of the egg donation that's being done in this country and the world as in general.