Donor Eggs & Donor Embryos
By Sandra B Wilson

The quality of a woman's eggs is directly related to fertility and is crucial to conception. Some of a woman's eggs will be so-called good egg while some will not. Age is among one of the biggest factors affecting egg quality in a woman. Egg Quality, as well as quantity, decline significantly with age. A woman I n her late 30s and 40s has a greater proportion of bad eggs. Poor egg quality can result in an egg not being properly implanted in the uterus even though it has been fertilized. Eggs that are successfully implanted may not be healthy enough to survive and result in miscarriage. Possible solutions for poor egg quantity or quality include IVF, using donor eggs or embryos.

Egg donation is the process by which a woman provides one or several for purposes of ART.

Similarly embryo donation is the process by which a woman who has undergone IVF provides one or several of her unused frozen embryos for the purposes of ART. In both cases, the donor may be known or anonymous.

Donor Eggs: An infertile female may seek donor eggs, usually up to 15 eggs (ova, oocytes), when she does not have eggs that can be successfully fertilized, often due to advanced reproductive age. Alternatively, a female may seek donor eggs if she has early onset of menopause, or was born without ovaries.

First, the couple needs to decide whether to use the eggs from a friend/family member or from an anonymous donor. Egg donors are usually anonymous donors from a fertility clinic. When the donor is anonymous, the recipient typically has access to her ethnic background, physical characteristics, educational record, and occupation. The couple receiving the egg donation may choose to meet with the egg donor, if she agrees. Most donors are under 30 years of age (21-29) and have undergone medical, genetic, and psychological screening. Once the eggs have been obtained, the role of the egg donor is complete, as the eggs are then fertilized in the laboratory. Couples who undergo IVF with donor eggs have about a 30 to 50 percent chance of having a baby per IVF cycle.

Donor Embryos: An infertile couple may see donor embryos, which are the combined sperm and eggs of a 3rd party.

The donor may be known or anonymous. Typically the donor is a woman, who has successfully or unsuccessfully undergone IVF treatment, and has frozen embryos she does not plan to use for herself. Not all women who have undergone IVF treatment give away their unused embryos. Some may, alternatively, choose to keep them frozen indefinitely, donate them for use in embryonic stem cell research or discard them.

Usually, embryo donations are handled by an embryo bank or fertility clinic. The embryo bank or fertility clinic will keep the embryos cryogenically preserved until they are a match is made between the embryo with the embryo recipient. When a woman donates one of her embryos, the newborn child is considered the woman carrier, the same as occurs with sperm donation. Each donor embryo will have undergone some testing and screening but this depends on the genetic parents' IVF process and clinic. The embryo recipient may opt for having her own embryologist conduct further screening and testing of the embryo.

Couples seeking donor eggs or embryos are should ask their clinic how the donor eggs or donor embryos were screened to ensure adequate testing and background checks were conducted.

Egg and embryo donation is also done for biomedical research purposes.

You can find helpful information about donor eggs and everything you need to know about donor embryos at Aha! Baby.

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