Egg Donation: About the Process, Finding Donor Eggs, and IVF
Channel: Dr. John Jain - Santa Monica Fertility
Date: 22/03/2017

Watch Dr. John Jain of the Santa Monica Fertility Clinic discuss the decision to use donor eggs, the process of finding an egg donor, IVF, and how to find an egg donor agency. 

TRANSCRIPT: Egg donation offers a real chance for a couple to have a child.  It's usually a decision that takes time to reach, usually a decision that is made after trying IVF and other fertility treatments and it’s definitely not a decision that should be taken lightly.  So egg donation is often sought by women who have reached a certain age and no longer have viable eggs or for gay men who need an egg donor to have a child. Interestingly a woman doesn’t have to choose an egg donor based on her blood type it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t impact the outcome at all. 

Egg donors are typically women in their twenties who are in college or post college or just working. It should be known that egg donor agencies are typically run by non-medical personnel so when seeking an egg donor it is important to work with a reputable and good agency that provides you know honest and transparent information. So once a couple chooses a donor the donor has to go through a battery of screening tests. 

In traditional egg donation after a couple chooses an egg donor from the agency and that donor is qualified medically she begins the process of in-vitro fertilization, so the donor takes injections of hormones to help recruit multiple eggs, now interestingly those eggs are only good for one month, that donor would lose the eggs anyway. So very importantly the donor is not affected by the process as it relates to her future fertility. We then retrieve the egg from the egg follicles in the operating room under anesthesia, the eggs are then provided to the intended parents where sperm is injected into the eggs.  The embryo is allowed to develop for five days, and on the fifth day we transfer one embryo to the intended mother. Additional embryos can be frozen and there is no shelf life on those embryos. 

A common question I have from intended mothers using an egg donation is what is my role with the baby?  And it is true that the hard wiring the DNA of the sperm and egg do influence things like the characteristics of the child but we are learning more about something called epigenetics whereby the womb is a place where that woman, that mother starts to influence the DNA of the actual fetus. Now we are seeing pregnancy rates from frozen embryos comparable to those of fresh embryos almost identical so whether a couple chooses to have a fresh embryo transfer or a frozen embryo transfer it doesn’t matter, we see the same pregnancy rate.  

The good news about having frozen embryos is if the first embryo transfer doesn’t work they have an immediate backup. And of course if the first embryo transfer works and it works sixty-six percent of the time then the frozen embryos could be a second child in years to come. At Santa Monica Fertility we really specialize in  shared egg donation and this is based on my observation that couples have a very hard time navigating egg donation agencies and all the moving parts so we find donors that are excellent donors, proven donors and provide those donors to our intended parents. So with shared egg donation donors go through the same screening process as they would with traditional egg donation but when we get the eggs more than one couple uses those eggs.  So for example a good donor will make about sixteen eggs, one couple will get eight eggs and from those eight eggs because it’s a proven good donor we often get three or more of the advanced embryos we call them Blastocyst. Each one has a chance of sixty-six percent in giving rise to a birth.  So we transfer one embryo and we freeze the rest.  If the couple does not achieve a pregnancy with the first transfer then the second and the third transfers are free.  So our program is really built in partnering with patients and donors getting good donors proven donors that make great eggs proven eggs and then assigning and then assigning a portion of the eggs that allows the couple to have multiple chances at a baby.  And of course one of the biggest benefits is because more than one couple is sharing the eggs the costs are much less than with traditional egg donation.  And we found this program to be very effective, patients like the idea that the doctor is intimately involved in selecting the donor. 

There has been a recent increase in frozen donor egg banks and frozen donor eggs are basically eggs that are not used at the time of egg retrieval and frozen for future use. But there are some down sides.  Whereas fresh embryos or even frozen embryos have birth rates of about sixty-six percent, the rate we see with frozen eggs is about fifty five percent. So it’s not bad but it is less than the rate with fresh.  We also don’t get as many embryos from frozen eggs as we do with fresh eggs, it’s more variable because the egg were frozen and thawed they are more vulnerable.