Egg Donation Agency

Currently a great story is going around - about how a 55-year-old woman and her husband in London took things in their own hands. They were trying to become parents for years and finally resorted to advertising on 50 public busses to find an egg donor. Here’s what they wrote:

‘We’ll never be Mummy and Daddy unless a wonderful woman aged 36 or under can help us by donating some of her eggs. You are our only chance of happiness.’

See the ad for yourself:

Thanks to one of the women who responded to the ad, Linda and Richard Weeks are now happy parents of little Katy.

You can read more about this story on BBC, ThisIsLondon, on KentNews, The West Australian, Kent Online, TopNews, Daily Mail, and other places. I wish all the best for their family.

Lisa Bertagnoli wrote a story for Chicago Business titled “The Stork Whisperer”.

It’s about a woman in Chicago who’s helping infertile couples to find solutions for their problems. She charges a consultation fee between $3,000 - $12,000 each, additionally to the costs of any procedures that couples want to pursue, but her clients seem to be very happy with her services and she is an expert on the field who stays in contact with most of the leading egg donation clinics in the US.

If you don’t yet fully understand what the ovarian reserve is and how it is determined, this post is the right one for you.

First of all, let’s remember: women lose eggs all throughout their live. On the day a woman is born she has on average 200,000 eggs. Then, as she grows older her eggs diminish in both quantity and quality. So the older you are the less eggs you have, or the smaller your ovarian reserve.

Generally a high ovarian reserve is good - the chances of getting pregnant are high - a low ovarian reserve on the other hand is bad news, because this chances of getting pregnant are low.

How can you tell what your ovarian reserve is? You really can’t tell accurately - there are different methods of testing and evaluating your ovarian reserve, but none of them is 100% precise. Here some methods to determine a woman’s ovarian reserve:

• age: the older you are, the smaller your ovarian reserve
• FSH (follicle stimulating hormone): this is the hormone that “makes” mature eggs so to speak.
• LH
• estradiol (E2)
• progesterone (P4)
• inhibin-B
• transvaginal ultrasound

This time we’re only going to look at FSH, because I think it’s the most significant.

There’s a way to “measure” your “baseline FSH level”. The baseline FSH level is basically how much of that hormone you have in your body on the 3rd day of your menstrual circle.

Now your brain basically tries to “keep you fertile” - if you have lots of fertile eggs it just needs to produce a little bit of FSH. But if that’s not the case and you have a low estrogen level then your brain tries to “make up for that” with producing lots of FSH so that more estrogen and more fertile eggs get produced. Once you enter menopause (when you run out of eggs in your ovaries) what happens is that your brain still tries to “keep you fertile”, thus pumping out lots of FSH into your body. So that means the higher your baseline FSH level, the lower your fertility.

Your baseline FSH level can be determined by a blood sample.

If you have questions just post a comment here.

Dr. Aniruddha Malpanifrom Bombay recently wrote about a request he recient from one potential patient. The patient listed a long list of qualifications that he demanded from an egg donor (qualities like that the donor would have to be very attractive, 5 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 8 inches height, light complexion, caucasion race, slender build, blue eyes, light colored hair)…

The patient even said that she would be willing to fly in an egg donor from America to India to have the procedure done there if necessary.

Now, the most obscure part of it all that she wanted to fertilize a cell and split it several times to produce 3 sets of up to 6 identical fertilized cells. The purpose is this step is to create the potential for identical twins (3 to 5 identical individuals). And then she wants those fertilized cells to be implanted in 4 surrogate mothers…

Even for me, I had Frankensteinish visions in the back of my mind when I read this…

Dr. Malpanifrom wasn’t comfortable with this request and thus posed the question whether this “wish list” is reasonable and how a doctor should react to it? Go over to his blog post and share your own opinion.