The decision to use egg donation to start a family is an important one in your journey to parenthood. Choosing an egg donor can seem daunting at first, but the process can be made easier than you think!
Although it is not possible to recreate yourself in an egg donor, it is important to decide on some specific features that are important to you. Spending time trying to find a donor that looks exactly like you often causes more stress and heartache in a process that should be a fulfilling and positive one.
When choosing a donor, it is important to first narrow down a few traits that are very important to you and your partner, such as skin tone, hair color, and eye color. Once you have chosen these traits, your donor coordinator can look for donors that align with them.
The next thing to consider is your budget. Dr. Danielle Lane and Lane Fertility Institute are committed to providing affordable options when it comes to egg donation, but there are different price points based on the donation options. Using an egg donor starts at around $20,000 for an egg bank cycle that includes an embryo transfer. Using a donor who is not local can cost up to $50,000+ when doing a traditional fresh donation. Our team at Lane Fertility wants egg donation to be more accessible to all families in our community, and we offer a variety of options to make using an egg donor more affordable without sacrificing the quality of care.
With your budget in mind, the next step is deciding on which egg donation option you prefer to use. Although there is not a significant difference in pregnancy rates using frozen vs. fresh eggs, some people still prefer to do a fresh donation. One reason is that a batch of six to eight frozen eggs is only designed to produce a single live birth. While there are examples of more live births from this number of eggs, it is not a guarantee. So, if your goal is to start a family and have multiple children, it is typically more cost-effective to use a fresh egg donor cycle and actually keep the majority or all of the eggs for your personal use. This is something that should be considered prior to choosing a donor, since some donors are only available for a frozen egg cycle.
Lane Fertility offers a variety of egg donation options, including using frozen eggs from our in-house egg bank, doing a fresh-shared cycle (buying a certain amount of fresh eggs from the donor and allowing us to freeze the rest in our bank for future use) with both local and not local donors, and doing a traditional fresh donation, in which you select a donor and receive all of the eggs from the retrieval, with both local and out-of-state donors.
Thinking through these options before embarking on your journey will make the process of choosing an egg donor much easier and much more efficient, getting you closer to achieving your dream of growing your family. Questions? Please drop us a line at donorcoordinator@lanefertility.com.
