Posts Tagged ‘egg donation agreement’
Some thoughts on making egg donation work
May 13, 2010 | By: Elizabeth
As I get closer to finishing my E-Book on egg donation, I seem to have more and more clients asking me some of the essential nuts and bolts questions about egg donation. It is urging me to write faster and get the first of the three book series finished. In the meantime, I have taken an old article I wrote for the then Hartford Chapter of RESOLVE on egg donation, and modified it for this blog post.
Here’s How One Woman Made Egg Donation Work:
Through the gift(s) provided by an egg donor, many infertile women are now able to experience pregnancy; sharing their thoughts, feelings, blood supply and the sound of their voice with their baby; and to deliver their child into the world. The success rates offered by many egg donation programs are staggering (nearing the 70% mark at most clinics), making this one of the more popular options in modern family building for women with diminished ovarian reserve or other issues of egg quality.
Egg donation is often so successful that you can potentially build your entire family from one egg donation cycle. Of course not every egg donation results in a pregnancy; but more often than not a carefully selected donor not only gets the recipient mother pregnant but there are extra embryos frozen for future family building.
Let us consider Janet[1], and her experience with egg donation. Janet is in her late thirties and after several failed IVF cycles, Janet’s doctors told her that her best chances for becoming a mother were through egg donation or adoption. Janet wanted to experience pregnancy, and so chose to pursue egg donation.
After doing research, Janet decided to work with an egg donation agency, rather than using her clinic’s in-house program. While some clinics are very flexible, Janet found she had more options when using an egg donation agency. By working with an agency Janet had greater flexibility in choosing her donor, didn’t have to share eggs with another infertile family, and would have greater control over her finances. Because she was on a tight budget, most of the agencies she spoke with encouraged Janet to select a donor who lived near the clinic she would be using, thus avoiding substantial travel expenses. Using an agency, Janet also had a greater selection of donors with compensation rates to fit her budget, compared with the fixed rates offered by most clinics.
One donor Janet considered (we’ll call her Leslie[2]), was twenty-six years old, single, had near perfect SAT scores, attended an Ivy League college, graduated at the top of her class and was attending medical school. Despite Leslie’s outstanding academic credentials (which sometimes result in higher compensation rates) Leslie’s requested compensation was within the middle range of both ASRM’s and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies’ (SART)[3] guidelines for egg donor compensation: $3,000-$7,000 per donation. Leslie also visibly resembled Janet and lived near their fertility clinic thus helping to make the cycle more affordable for Janet and her partner. Leslie seemed like the perfect donor.
Leslie, however, had no “track record” donating eggs. She had never been an egg donor before and didn’t have any children of her own. Although statistically, carefully screened first-time (or “unproven”) donors have the same success rates in helping infertile women/couples achieve pregnancy, Janet was concerned that she would spend money to have Leslie donor undergo the first part of the necessary screening process, only to find out that Leslie was not sufficiently fertile and had been disqualified from being an egg donor.
Janet and her partner were also considering matching with a donor named “Julie”. Julie also was twenty-six, had high SAT scores, had attended college, and had never been an egg donor before. Julie was requesting the same compensation as had Leslie ($5,000) and lived near Janet’s clinic. However, Julie was married, and had two-and-half-year old twins and a one-year old baby. Julie was clearly fertile (she had children) and thus would be more likely to produce healthy eggs, which to Janet and her partner meant she presented a lower risk of being “screened out” by their fertility clinic.
Once Janet and her partner selected Julie as their donor, Janet’s egg donation agency presented them with a list of attorneys to help prepare their egg donation agreement, and it arranged for Julie to be represented by separate counsel in connection with the negotiation and drafting of their agreement. The egg donation agreement is a critical aspect of the egg donation process and all parties should be represented by independent counsel. The egg donation agreement will protect your rights as parents and govern your relationship with your donor for years to come. You should have the right to select your own attorney, one who is an experienced reproductive lawyer.
Each egg donation agreement is unique; some agreements provide for complete disclosure of names and addresses and others are completely anonymous. Whatever your comfort level or that of your donor may be regarding future contact, please consider that your agreement should ensure that you can contact your donor in case of a future medical emergency. Among other things, your egg donation agreement should specify your rights to utilize and/or dispose of the eggs/embryos created from the cycle, require that your donor follow medical directions, address what happens if your donor breaches your agreement or if the cycle needs to be rescheduled for some reason (like a death in the donor’s family), and/or how medical bills are handled if she experiences a complication like ovarian hyper-stimulation.
Within four months of the time Janet initially contacted their egg donation agency, Janet, Julie and their respective partners had negotiated their agreement and their cycle got underway. Julie produced seventeen eggs of which fifteen fertilized. Janet conceived a beautiful baby girl on the first embryo transfer and when Janet’s daughter was about a year-old, Janet and her partner went back and did a frozen embryo transfer; this time conceiving twin girls (it is admittedly rare for a frozen cycle to result in a twin pregnancy but in this case it did)!
[1] Janet is a combination of several of my clients, a fictitious character created for purposes of this blog to help demonstrate a typical egg donation process from a more “real life” perspective.
[2] Names have been changed to protect people’s privacy.
[3] ASRM (The American Society for Reproductive Medicine) and SART are related organizations which, among other things, establish ethical and regulatory guidelines that many clinics and agencies agree to comply with. For more information, visit their websites: #www.ASRM.org# and #www.sart.org#
Filed under: Egg Donation, Thoughts on Choosing an Egg Donor
Tags: biological clock, choosing an egg donor, Donor Compensation, Egg Donation, egg donation agreement, egg donation cycle, Finances, infertility, IVF, Parentage, reproductive attorney, reproductive lawyer
