Egg Donation Process
Selecting the Egg Donor is an emotional process for some Intended Parents. They may have different criteria while selecting the suitable egg donor. For some previous donation history is most important, while others pay more attention to education level, physical appearance, ethnicity, and age. In order to make the selection process easier, we have donor profiles attached to each donor. Profiles content the information about their donation history, family medical history, education, current occupation and many other. This enables the Intended Parents to shortlist the candidates based on their requirements.
When Intended Parents approach us we give them login information to review all available egg donors and based on their preferred dates for IVF we approve the candidate for them. After the selection is finished we sign the contracts with the parents and perform the necessary screening which includes the following:
- CBC/hb- Complete blood count/hemoglobin
- Blood group and Rhesus – In case blood emergency transfusion is required.
- HIV -Human immunodeficiency virus
- HbsAg -Hepatitis B
- VDRL- Syphillis
- HCV- Hepatitis C
- FSH (CD2-4) follicle stimulating hormone – tests for ovarian reserve ( must be measured on day 2-4 of menses)
- LH (CD2-4)- Luteinizing hormone ( Must be measured on day 2-4 of menses )
- AMH – Anti Mullerian Hormone
- Estradiol Level – done on day 2 nd or 3 rd of monthly cycle
- TSH – Thyroid stimulating hormone/thyroid function test
- Prolactin- Measures the level of hormone prolactin produced by the pituitary gland. High levels can indicate infertility.
- Pelvic ultrasound for antral follicle count (day 3-5 of menses )
- Vaginal swab tests for Chlamydia to rule out any infection that may flare up during or after retrieval
- Herpes Virus
- Cytomegalovirus
Once the screening is approved, the donor is ready to be involved into the program and we start her stimulation matching the dates selected by the intended parents. If for any reason, donor fails to screen, we allow the parents to select another egg donor from the database again and we will perform screening on new egg donor without any additional payment from the Intended Parents.
For stimulation, we use short antagonist protocols that may last between 10-14 days, depending on the follicle growth. Stimulation injections used for stimulation are the following: Gonal F, Menopure, Cetrotyde and Ovitrel as a final ovulation trigger.
The screening mentioned above is a standard screening that we perform, however, if the Intended Parents have any further screening requirement, we will calculate the additional payment based on requested screening and we perform it with additional expenses.
Intended Parents find very convenient that we allow them meeting with the egg donors. This depends on parents desire and of course, is not obligatory. We arrange the meetings only upon request only.
As we have connections with reputable agencies and clinics, on top of having Georgian egg donors, we give an opportunity to the parents to select the Egg donors from a different destination such as Ukraine, Poland, South Africa, Thailand, China, and India. More details and login information is given upon request. Donor start preparations in local IVF clinics and they only come to Georgia on day 9 of stimulation, after knowing that stimulation is progressing well. Due to accommodation, flight, food, and transportation expenses, the package with traveling egg donors is little higher, but many intended parents find it comfortable as it truly widens their options.
What Intended Parents Should Know
We inform all the Intended Parents that a number of eggs cannot be guaranteed and even if the egg donor has previous good donation history this is still not the assurance that her following donation would have the same results. From our side, we ensure that if during the stimulation Egg Donor does not respond well and her follicle count is not satisfactory, we inform the Intended Parents about it and suggest them to terminate the preparation. This happens at the very rare occasion. We inform the Intended Parents that even number of follicles during the stimulation does not mean the number of eggs we receive after retrieval, as some follicles might be empty or eggs might be immature. Therefore the expectation of the number of eggs cannot be given in advance.
The above statement about some possible outcomes of egg donation program does not serve to make Intended Parents scared and assume that the mentioned cases are common and any of you may face similar scenarios. It is completely opposite, we just do our best to make sure we meet Intended Parents expectations and they are informed about even slightest possibilities where egg donation programs may lead them. Stimulation terminations or having Empty Follicles is very rare and we may encounter such case once a year. Having over 11 000 successful IVF programs performed by us speaks about the rareness of failures and happy ending stories of great majority of our Intended Parents.