Egg Donation
New Hope for IVF
Before IVF became widely available, and even for a long time after that, women with premature ovarian failure, diminished ovarian reserve, or genetic disease usually found themselves at the end of the fertility road. Now, we have more options to help people in this situation than ever before. Today more women than ever can become pregnant with their own eggs.
However, in cases where we find a woman has no healthy eggs left- even if she is menopausal – we can usually achieve a rapid healthy pregnancy with the help of a donated egg. Dr Palter was fortunate to be part of the egg donation team at Yale in the early 1990’s where they developed many of the protocols used today and had successes many many years before the other local Long Island Programs offered egg doantion.
Remarkably, we have learned that the uterus ages very little through the 40’s and even 50’s so once a health egg is found the woman can carry the pregnancy perfectly.
While egg donation seems an overwhelming step for many, over the past more than 20 years that we have offered this treatment we have never seen a couple once they were pregnant regret their decision even for a second. We often tell couples to close their eyes and imagine it’s 3 years from now, and you are coming back to visit. What would make you most happy? Imagine you are returning holding hands with your 3-year old child laughing and singing. How would that make you feel? For almost everyone the goal is a healthy family and once you get there you all love each other and never look back or care how you got there.
If you need to use egg donation to conceive, our egg donor coordinators will work closely with you to help identify the right donor, get whatever tests you need to make sure the treatments will work using donated eggs. A remarkable recent advance is the ability to use frozen eggs.
Our embryologist Ed Stehlik helped develop the best method for egg freezing called vitrification and had one of the first pregnancies in the world with this technique. Having known him for years when we first opened GCIVF we partnered with him (while he was still in Connecticut at the time) and had the first baby from a frozen egg donor on Long Island. Now we have replaced our fresh donors with a frozen egg bank.
Our success rates stayed the same but we were able to reduce the costs and time both by two-thirds! Once we make sure you are a great candidate for IVF using donor eggs, we give you gentle hormones to mimic a natural cycle to help your body get ready to receive the fertilized embryo. In cases where we use previously-frozen donor eggs, we can also time the cycle to your schedule and to your body’s rhythm.
Our psychological team works together with the clinical egg donor team to make sure you get the support and information you need as you consider and work through the egg donation process.
So many of our patients have found success using this advanced technique! If you need a donor, you can too.
