Thanks to egg donation, many couples with fertility problems are able to have children. Despite popular belief, egg donation is a painless process and although the requirements to become a donor are quite demanding, any young woman in good health is a good candidate.
Almost 30 years have passed since the first child conceived through egg donation was born in 1984.
Many women have been able to achieve their dream of becoming mothers, thanks to the altruistic, supportive and anonymous donation of another woman. Clinically, we call an oocyte recipient a patient who receives donated oocytes.
There are several reasons why a woman has to resort to egg donation in order to achieve gestation:
- Failure of other assisted reproduction treatments.
- Advanced age, closely related to a worse reproductive prognosis with own eggs.
- Having menopause.
- The possibility of transmitting a hereditary disease to your child and not wanting to assume that risk.
Who can be a donor?
At FIVMadrid we meticulously select the egg donors, after a medical and psychological interview. They must be between 18 and 35 years old, healthy and have no family history of a transmissible genetic disease. They undergo an analysis with general analysis, serology, karyotype, cytology and ultrasound and when everything is normal, they begin an ovarian stimulation treatment, with follicular puncture under sedation, in order to be able to donate their gametes.
The recipient undergoes an endometrial preparation treatment that lasts between 15 and 45 days and is synchronized with her donor, trying to respect the phenotypic similarity. Once it is ultrasonographically proven that there is a good endometrium, the recipient waits for the donation during the following days.
On the day of the donor’s follicular puncture, the oocytes are fertilized with sperm from the couple or from the sperm bank. The resulting embryos are observed and evaluated in the laboratory and 2 to 5 days later 1 or 2 embryos are transferred into the uterus, through a simple and painless process.
High success rate
By using eggs from young women, the success rate with this treatment is very high, many get pregnant in each fresh cycle and this result is independent of the age of the recipient woman. In Spain it is possible to be an egg recipient up to the age of 50.
The experience of women who have achieved pregnancy after this treatment is usually very satisfactory. It has not been proven that children born after egg donation have more problems than the rest of the population. It is also important, according to psychologists, to tell this child about his or her origin in the future and to share it with him or her in a natural way.