EGG DONATION

Before you can undergo the egg donation procedure, you’ll first have a medical assessment. This involves:

• Filling out detailed medical questionnaires which detail your medical history, and your family’s medical history.
• Having an initial call with a Specialist Donation Practitioner from the Egg Donor Support Team, who will discuss the egg donation process with you in detail.
• Visiting your local Care Fertility clinic for some hormone blood tests and a vaginal ultrasound scan.

Once your results are back from your hormone tests and scan, you’ll have another appointment with the Specialist Donation Practitioner, to review your results and go over the next steps.

Providing you meet the criteria for donation, you’ll go back to the clinic for some more blood tests – this time for screening for infectious diseases and genetic and hereditary conditions.

Choosing to donate your eggs is a personal and important decision. So, after you’ve talked through the process with your Specialist Donation Practitioner, you’ll also have the option to meet virtually with one of our experienced counsellors. They’ll be able to talk to you about the implications of egg donation and listen to any thoughts or worries you might have.

Before we collect your eggs, we’ll ask you to sign a few consent forms. These documents not only grant permission for us to collect your eggs but also establish what you’d like us to do with your eggs in a number of different scenarios.

You can also write a brief goodwill message, which can be given to those children when they turn 18; you might like to tell them about how it felt to help their parents, your hobbies, or just how your friends would describe you.

The first step of the treatment cycle is to stimulate your ovaries. To do this, you’ll need to give yourself daily injections for around twelve days, which we’ll teach you how to do. During this time, you’ll also need to come into the clinic on three or four mornings for ultrasound scans and blood tests.

Egg collection is a non-surgical procedure. It is typically done under mild sedation or local anaesthetic; you will not need a general anaesthetic. No incision is made, and no stitches are necessary.

Using ultrasound as a guide, we use a needle to extract eggs from the ovarian follicles via the vagina. At most, you’ll feel a few twinges, but we’d recommend having a short rest before going home.

Your eggs will be added to our Egg Bank for recipients to select for their treatment.

After donating your eggs, you’ll be entitled to find out if any babies have been born as a result, and if so, the year they were born in, and their gender. We usually recommend getting back in touch with us after a year or so if you wish to find out this information.

If a child is born from your donation, they might choose to request information about who you are when they turn 18. Your Specialist Donation Practitioner and counsellor can talk to you all about this during your session.